


Possible Worlds

by rellkelltn87



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst, But Fits Into Current Canon, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Developing Relationship, Fan Fiction Is Actually Part of the Case, Fanfiction, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Murder, some smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25865554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rellkelltn87/pseuds/rellkelltn87
Summary: After Barba's departure from the DA's office, three seemingly unrelated cases come together, all connected to two nights in 1999 when Benson and Barba met by chance at a bar in Brooklyn, long before they were friends or colleagues.Rewrite to give a now-orphaned fic (that I made up as I went along and was *all over the place*) a much stronger throughline.
Relationships: Rafael Barba/Olivia Benson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	1. History

**October 1999**

On a chilly autumn evening, Detective Olivia Benson walked into a bar in downtown Brooklyn frequented by many of the borough’s lawyers, court employees, and higher-grade detectives. She wore her dress blues because she’d just come from the funeral of Mira Margolis, a former colleague who’d transferred to homicide back in 1994, after only two years on SVU. 

A former colleague, a current friend. 

How could Benson say “former friend” when all “former” meant was that Mira had been murdered, and was no longer a phone call away? 

Lieutenant Mira Margolis had made detective first grade before the end of her second year with homicide, became a sergeant after her third year, and had recently passed the lieutenant’s exam. She’d accepted a position heading up a precinct near the Brooklyn-Queens border. Benson should have been at the bar celebrating her promotion, not asking around about the investigation into her murder. 

All Benson knew, all she was allowed to know, was that preliminary evidence suggested that Mira had been murdered by her 18-year-old son Eric and that both the Brooklyn SVU and homicide divisions were involved with the investigation. _Why SVU?_ was one of her questions; her other, more important question was _why Eric?_

Benson had met with the lead detective on the case two days earlier, when the autopsy was complete. She told Detective Cal Walker that Mira’s husband Neil, a high school social studies teacher in Bensonhurst, was extremely naive and might have become involved with the wrong people. “And there’s a lot more to the story that you’re not seeing,” she’d said. Detective Walker thanked her but didn’t offer up any more information on the direction of the investigation, even when she asked. 

“You have to promise me you’ll look into her whole story,” Benson said.

“Not your case, Detective,” Walker answered, making no promises. “Let us do our jobs.”

“Promise me,” Benson repeated.

“Just like you look into the whole story behind your cases, so do we. You have any information that might help us along?”

“No,” she said. 

“Any suspicions?”

“No.” Both of her _no_ s were lies. She had good reason for leaving it up to Detective Walker, a man who refused to make her any promises, to look into Mira’s history on his own. 

Cragen had warned her more than once that her badge was on the line if she got involved. Mira lived and worked in Brooklyn, and Manhattan SVU was not allowed to overstep their jurisdictional boundaries.

But that wasn’t why she wouldn’t offer up any information to Detective Walker. 

She suspected there were reasons that he’d been so quick to name Eric as a suspect, reasons that would put Benson’s own life in danger if anyone discovered how much she knew about her friend’s life before NYPD. They didn’t have enough evidence to charge the 18-year-old, anyway, she told herself. 

Benson would be killed or attacked or driven out of town, and Eric would somehow remain the prime suspect in Mira’s murder, so what good would that be? She’d fail the justice system she worked with, the department she dreamed of bettering, and Mira’s memory. Detective Walker, who wouldn’t make her any promises, was not to be trusted with handling this case, Benson was almost certain.

So, on this evening at the bar, Benson ordered herself a Cabernet and opened her ears to what was around her. Halfway through that first glass, she was ready to give up. All she heard were complaints about significant others, the Mets-who-let-us-down-at-the-last-second-again, and occasionally, the long working hours at the Brooklyn DA’s office. She slipped two dollars to the bartender and stood, preparing to return to Manhattan.

In the booth behind her was a dark-haired man, maybe a few years younger than she was, probably lucky enough to still be in his twenties, hunched over a legal pad. He had manila file folders open and spread out over the table, a tumbler of what looked like scotch to his left, an electronic personal data assistant and a cell phone stacked one on top of the other to his right. His tie was loosened and the top two buttons of his blue checkered shirt were open. She made him for an attorney, probably an ADA.

“Hi,” she said, sliding into the booth, sidling up next to him. 

“Hi,” he looked up only halfway, raising an eyebrow in her direction. “Are we … working … a case together?”

“No. Do you have a minute to talk? You look like you need a break.” She caught herself overly flirting, hoping he’d let down his guard. He was still in his twenties, for sure. He couldn’t have built up that many defense mechanisms yet. “I’m Olivia. You are —?”

“Rafael Barba. I’m an ADA with Brooklyn SVU.”

“Nice to meet you, Rafael.”

He looked back down at his legal pad and started to take notes on the case he was reading. “After much handwringing and what my mother would call agita, I recently disclosed a relationship with an NYPD detective,” he said, still scribbling away, “so if you’re flirting, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Rafael Barba, Brooklyn definitely-not-a-day-over-28 Brooklyn ADA, had caught onto her right away and was, despite his apparent youth, well up to his ears in defense mechanisms. “I’m in Brooklyn for Mira Margolis’s funeral,” Benson said. “I’m not here to flirt.”

“Oh.” He dropped his pen and, blinking a few times, looked over at her. “As far as I know, I’m not the ADA assigned to that case.”

“So Brooklyn SVU really is involved.”

Barba bit his lip. “I’m sorry, Detective, that’s not my —”

“Call me Olivia.”

“That’s not my place to tell you.”

“Okay, thank you, Rafael,” she said, dropping the façade she’d put on to get information out of him. She stood, and he stood with her, shaking the hand she’d reached out to him. “Nice meeting you.”

“Same here. I’m sorry about your friend.”

His hand was warm.

Briefly — and it must have been grief, grief and sleeplessness, grief and agitated — she found herself wishing she could intertwine her fingers with this stranger’s. Reflexively, she offered him a smile. 

For a split second, he closed his eyes. 

As Benson headed for the door, she turned back to glance at the man sipping his scotch and scribbling on his legal pad. She wondered what he knew.

**December 1999**

Benson was back in the bar in Brooklyn to meet with Detective Cal Walker, off-the-record, off-the-book, so she could tell him outright that he and his boss were wrong to close the case so early, for letting the DAs office charge Mira’s son and then plead him out on a lesser charge, for not looking into other possibilities before sending a young man to prison for ten years for a crime that he may not have committed. Eric Margolis had been like a nephew to Benson, and for that reason, she was now ready to tell Walker everything she knew. 

“You’re gonna tell me about Minnesota?” Walker said. “I know all about Minnesota. My boss and my partner know all about Minnesota. We questioned her son’s biological father, Detective Benson.” He went on to describe a full investigation that accounted for Mira’s past, for all the secrets that Mira had confided in no one other than her sister and Benson. “So if you’re accusing me of being stupid or worse, you’re wrong.”

Benson nodded, aware that maybe Walker hadn’t been able to disclose the details of his investigation while it was still going on, much like she couldn’t disclose the details of her ongoing investigations, and that maybe grief and fear had led her to believe otherwise. It was clear that Brooklyn homicide had conducted a complete investigation after all, Benson tried to reassure herself. 

“Are we done?” Walker asked.

“Yes. Thank you.”

Walker stood and headed for another table. Benson noticed Rafael Barba, the ADA she’d met six weeks prior, sitting at the bar, tapping on his personal data assistant with his right hand. His left hand was balled into a fist.

_Go home, Liv,_ she tried to tell herself. _He’s involved with someone else in NYPD, serious enough to disclose. Head for the door._

She sat next to Barba and ordered a Cabernet.

“Detective,” he said, a half-smile forming on his face, “Brooklyn SVU is no longer involved in the Margolis investigation, and my colleague has already agreed to a plea deal with Mr. Margolis.”

“I know. I have more people to chew out later over how badly they’ve handled this case.”

“Are you all right?” he asked, and she noticed that his palms were now both resting flat on top of the bar.

“I will be. I suspect that the investigation may have been handled better than I originally thought, but.” She stopped to take a breath. 

“But?” Barba prompted.

“I want to make sure justice is done for a good detective, a good lieutenant, someone who deserved much more than the hand she was dealt.”

Barba nodded. “She will. It will, I mean.” He cleared his throat. “Justice.”

“Are you telling me,” Benson said, leaning in towards him, “Brooklyn SVU is still investigating?”

“I’m telling you,” she said, turning his body on the barstool so he was facing her, “nothing of the sort.”

“Thank you, counselor.”

“For what I didn’t tell you.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t tell you anything about Brooklyn SVU.” 

“No,” she said, thinking she was playing along, “you didn’t.”

“Walker, you might watch out for him and his “thorough investigations.” But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Got it.” 

Barba’s phone rang, and he let out a long, shallow sigh. Benson could see his hands tremble, one of his legs shake as he squinted at the tiny screen. “Got to take this,” he said. “Good seeing you again, Detective. We’ll meet under better circumstances, someday, I hope.”

She patted his arm before he ducked outside. She lingered a while at the bar, sipping her wine, maybe hoping to avoid the freezing cold for a while, maybe hoping that Barba would come back. 

He was in a serious relationship, she reminded herself for the third time, one serious enough to warrant disclosure. 

As she walked out of the bar and headed towards the subway, she caught sight of Barba around the corner, leaning against the side of the building, his cell phone cradled uncomfortably between his ear and his shoulder, a cigarette in his trembling hand, the other hand shoved into his pocket. 

“Deja que Lucia tome la decisión, por qué no puedes dejárselo a ella?” she heard him say into the phone. “Okay. Okay. Sí, naturalmente, ella dejó todo para mí.”

She willed herself not to eavesdrop. She _tried_ to will herself not to eavesdrop.

“I can’t,” Barba said. “No puedo. How do you — it would be like — como matarlo, y eso podría sentirse bien, God help me. No puedo. Give me two more days.”

He shoved the phone in his pocket and took another shaky drag off his cigarette. When Benson moved in closer, he sucked in a breath, a gasp almost, and in the almost-otherworldly glow of artificial city lights, she saw tears in his eyes. 

“Rafael,” she said, reaching out to touch his other hand through his coat pocket, “breathe. What’s going on?”

“Private matter,” he stammered.

“Okay. That’s okay.”

He took his hand out of his pocket and grasped desperately at her hand. “Shh,” she said, “breathe.” She massaged his palm with her thumb. “Breathe. You’re okay.”

“Sorry,” he said suddenly, withdrawing a few steps to the side. “Lots of shit going on in my family that I would not want to drag you into.” He threw his cigarette butt to the ground and stamped it out with his wingtip shoe. “You seem like a very sweet, very smart, very dedicated person who should not be dragged into my shit.” He smiled briefly, uncomfortably.

“We’ll see each other again,” she promised, “like you said, under better circumstances.”

“Of course.” Now his smile seemed a bit more relaxed, more genuine. “I should head home.”

**December 2000**

The spring after Mira’s murder, new evidence turned up that her son Eric had not been home when the murder was committed. Detective Walker dismissed this alibi as a lie that couldn’t be backed up by anyone other than the people claiming they were with Eric in his college’s dining hall 180 miles upstate that afternoon. Walker, his team, and his lieutenant would not budge. Eric had already entered a guilty plea. In their view, that was the end of the story. 

“Watch it,” Cragen had warned her. “You’re on track for detective first grade. You’re on track for sergeant someday, and this’ll set you back ten years, being reprimanded for nosing around in another jurisdiction for a friend.”

Sometimes, she went to the bar in Brooklyn to look for Rafael Barba, but she didn’t find him. She hoped that the detective with whom he was in a disclosure-worthy relationship had comforted him about whatever decision he’d made that had left him wracked with guilt, that the detective had held him while he cried over the decisions that should have been up to Lucia, whoever Lucia was.

She remembered that overheard conversation too well. She wasn’t sure why it continued to ring in her ears, why she cared so much about the ADA who she’d only met twice, both times by chance.

A few days after she buried Serena, Benson found herself back at Rafael Barba’s bar once more. She didn’t know what to make of her guilt, the sense that maybe her unwillingness to grieve for Serena made her an awful person, a bad daughter. She was relieved that Serena was gone, and wondered if the man she’d met at this bar last year had a similar sort of guilt weighing on his soul.

She was almost certain of that, on account of the half-conversation she’d eavesdropped on a year ago. 

Deduction skills, grossly misapplied.

Gathering a bit of courage — Olivia Benson had plenty of courage, this was pure _stupidity_ she’d gathered — she asked the bartender about Rafael Barba. She said they’d worked a case together (they hadn’t) and that she had some information that might help a family with a civil suit. “I’m sure they’re having a romantic night in,” she said, feigning a familiarity she’d probably never share with the ADA.

That was how she learned about the end of Barba’s two-year relationship with a Brooklyn detective. Benson was gut-punched by more guilt over the fact that she’d pried into this stranger’s life simply because she’d sensed a spark between them both times their hands touched. She wasn’t sixteen years old. She knew better. 

Besides, his former romantic partner, the man with whom he’d probably imagined disclosure to be Act 5 of a comedy, the final paragraph of a romance novel, was a 39-year-old man, a detective first grade from Bensonhurst (information proffered by the bartender, not asked for, not detectived out of him in any way) which strongly, _strongly_ suggested she wasn’t his type — right? — because she wasn’t stupid or narcissistic enough to believe everyone she was attracted to had precisely the same proclivities, the same patterns of attraction, that she did, and here she was on her third Cabernet, and she was _drunk_ , and how stupid was she to inadvertently get drunk, tonight, on this week of all weeks?

She didn’t go near a bar, or a bottle, for a year after that because her own actions that night scared her so much.

Years later, Dr. Lindstrom would assure her that she’d overreacted, but at least she’d overreacted in the better direction.

**Fall 2011**

For more than a decade, she stayed away. Then, out of nowhere, Stabler retired, and within weeks, stopped returning her calls. Kathy begged Benson to forgive him, pleading with her that Stabler had been through too much, but soon Kathy stopped calling and e-mailing too, and it was as though her partner and friend of twelve years had never existed. Benson got a promotion to detective first grade and a new partner. 

She could move on. She could stay in the same place and move on, again, for what felt like the thousandth time. 

As Stabler’s absence burned a new hole in her heart, Benson learned that Mira Margolis’s case had gone cold. 

Not that Mira’s case had ever been all that hot for her colleagues in Brooklyn: Eric’s conviction was finally overturned on account of the overlooked alibi, but not until he’d served five years of his ten-year sentence. Detective Walker had already retired, so they couldn’t even call his wrist in for slapping. 

Still, it hurt Benson to find out that Brooklyn had shelved her friend’s case, apparently for good. There would be no extra effort made to find the killer of the lieutenant who’d given her soul to the job. 

Cold, ignored, as if Mira had never headed up a precinct, as if Mira’s son had never been wrongfully charged and convicted, as if Mira had never been murdered.

When Benson returned to the bar for the first time in nearly eleven years, she saw Rafael Barba.

Outside, the air was dry, the wind tunnels blistering painful against her face. When she opened the door, she spotted Barba near the bar, talking with a group of people, probably fellow ADAs. His coat and scarf were on. He was on his way out.

He didn’t see her and she made no effort to draw his attention away from the three people he left with. 

She’d come to find him.

But. 

That was ridiculous, dragging her broken heart into a bar she hadn’t been to for eleven years in the hope of finding comfort in someone with whom she’d only had two brief encounters, someone who had never been her friend. 

She went home.

**2012-Present**

Benson heard the name Rafael Barba again in 2012, when Captain Harris mentioned his name in conjunction with the Jocelyn Paley case. She told Harris she thought Barba was in Brooklyn. When Harris said that Barba had requested a lateral transfer to Manhattan, she wondered why. 

When they were introduced in court, he acted as though they’d never met. 

Maybe he didn’t remember her. 

Maybe he didn’t want to remember that the second time they'd met was on what was likely one of the worst nights of his life.

She understood. Even without knowing his whole story, she understood.


	2. Another

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a revision of a now-orphaned fic that I made up as I went along. I wanted to give it a stronger throughline, so I'm changing a lot of plot elements and the order in which plot points appear. Practicing for someday writing a novel. ;-)
> 
> It's not worth reading the original version, which is *extremely confusing.*
> 
> Chapter here futzes around with the Season 19 timeline a bit. The rest of the story doesn't engage with S20 AT ALL, except for one middle-finger bonus coming up in the next chapter. 
> 
> Anyway! Story!

Barba stopped by Benson’s place the evening after he’d made Mariel McLaughlin, a long-term Munchausen’s victim, confess on the stand. _Can I come over?_ he’d texted her, and, since she’d already heard the news about Mariel from Rollins, she texted back, _Of course. Come talk to me._

By 9:30, Noah was sleeping in his own room for the first time in ten days and Barba was sitting at Benson’s kitchen counter staring into his scotch. Benson’s back was pressed to the wall.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” he said, popping the _t_ hard behind his front teeth as he ran an index finger around the rim of his glass. “I did my job. I got the defendant to confess on the stand. McCoy’ll want to have a statue of me built in Foley Square.”

“Rafa.” She left her spot near the wall to stand behind him, to lay an open hand on his back, another near his shoulder. His muscles momentarily spasmed beneath her touch, then loosened again, with a reflexive hum escaping his throat. “Do you empathize with Mariel?” When he didn’t answer, she added: “I do.” 

He hung his head.

She pressed a kiss to the back of his neck. 

“Huh.” His shoulders moved up and down, a half-hearted laugh. “That’s a long shot if you’re looking to help me get a mistrial.” He smirked into his scotch. “I don’t empathize with Mariel, but I can understand her desperation, which at this point is irrelevant, because I filed the charges I was supposed to file, and I prosecuted the way I was supposed to prosecute.”

“Which is why you’re here tonight, wringing your hands, drinking scotch in my apartment.” Her own hands were still on his shoulders. “Come on. Come sit with me on the couch. It’ll be more comfortable.”

He stood, sucking in a deep breath through his nose, letting it out with a much deeper sigh. They sat together, and she curled up next to him, her head on his shoulder, and, after a few moments, his fingers lightly stroking her hair. 

“A mistrial,” he said, “on the basis that you and I have become —”

“Too close.”

“On the basis of all the things I’d do for that beautiful, wicked smile. For the happy smile too, the delighted, contented smile, to be one of the lucky few who gets to see Olivia smile at least a hundred times before the sun comes up.”

“ _Smooth_ ,” she teased, and his smirk morphed into a crooked grin before she kissed his lips. “But —”

“But Optimum.”

“Optimum,” she said, settling her cheek back against his dress shirt, winding her fingers around his suspenders. 

“We have to wait until all the Optimum lawsuits are in federal court. The Ledger will have a field day if they hear about a “workplace romance” happening between an investigator and a prosecutor, since those assholes don’t know the difference between two equals who work together becoming romantically involved and the _criminality_ of what happened at Optimum.”

“They know the difference. They pretend not to, because it makes for better headlines, more advertising money. Rafa, look, I made this mistake with Tucker. The St. Fabiola’s case almost fell apart because of us. You remember.”

“I remember.” He kissed the top of her head. “It’s all right. I wanted to make a move years ago, you know.”

“I didn’t. You’re good at hiding your thoughts. Very good.”

He went back to caressing her hair. “You empathize with Mariel,” he said, half to himself.

“I almost did kill her once, in self-defense. I had to get a lawyer for myself.”

She felt his chest rise and fall, another heavy sigh in his throat as he hugged her tightly to him. 

“About a week after she died, this is more than seventeen years ago now, I went to your bar in Brooklyn. I was looking for you.”

“You were —”

“Rafa.” She lifted her head. Stretching one arm out towards the coffee table, she picked up her son’s stuffed elephant. “There are elephants in the room other than Eddie that need to be confronted.”

“All right,” he said, that sweet, lopsided grin taking over his face once more as he took the stuffed elephant from her and pitched him across the living room, “let’s go in the bedroom and make that mistrial happen.”

She playfully smacked his arm. “Optimum,” she reminded him. “A few more months.”

“When the federal cases are up.” 

“I was stupid,” she admitted. “I —”

“You could never be stupid.”

“I was. Seventeen years ago, my heart was broken, I didn’t know how to grieve, I didn’t want to grieve at all, and I remembered you from the year before, a conversation I’d eavesdropped on, and I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He kissed her lips softly, almost chastely. “When — who was it, Steven Harris? — introduced us, I didn’t want to remember that time in my life, I didn’t want to remember 1999. That good enough for you?”

“You never brought it up.”

“They made me responsible for pulling the plug on the man who beat my mother. A year later the person I thought was the great love of my life left me because I couldn’t accept that his asshole family didn’t want me around, and, Liv, I don’t like to talk about this, I’ve never wanted to talk about it.”

“Okay.” The word fell from her lips like a promise. She rubbed his temple with her thumb and kissed each cheek near the pockets under his eyes. “I went to that bar three times looking for you.”

“That was you? The bartender told me to be careful because there was a “lady detective” nosing around who desperately wanted to get into my pants.”

“Good thing I walked out of there the third time, when I actually saw you there.”

“When was that?”

“Um.” She pursed her lips and sat up straight. “Later.”

Barba leaned in towards her, his lips dangerously close to her jawline. “When?”

“2011.”

“”And you never said anything?”

“I was inappropriate. And you never said anything about 1999 when we were introduced.” 

“I know. Listen,” he said, resting a hand on his knee and taking a deep breath, “part of the problem was, I knew Cal Walker was a bad guy, a corrupt cop.”

“What?” Benson stood, and, facing away from Barba, said, “You knew he was corrupt all these years and let an innocent man go to jail for —”

“No, no, no,” Barba said, holding his hands out in front of him, “his corruption had nothing to do with your friend’s case. My ex was his former partner when they were both officers, in the 80s. Walker was mobbed up. Remember all the cops they went after in the mid-90s? They never caught Walker, though. He’s comfortably retired.”

Benson covered her mouth with her hand. 

“Liv?” Barba prompted. 

“If I told you that before she came to New York, Mira was involved with a mob lawyer, would that have made any difference?” 

Barba blinked. “It — it might have.”

“I told Walker over and over again that Eric might have been set up. Walker told me he _knew_ everything about Minnesota, everything about Mira’s background, so I assumed that _I_ was wrong, that he had fully investigated the case. If Walker was mobbed up, that makes a huge difference, a huge difference in something it’s too late to fix now.”

Barba walked up to Benson and embraced her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have spoken up.”

“You were going through the worst time in your life. How could either of us have known that if we put our stories together, Eric would never have had to spend those five years in jail?”

“I never want to make you sad,” he told her. “Never.”

“I remember all those years ago when you said you didn’t want to drag me into your shit.”

“I didn’t. You seemed too kind, too beautiful, too —”

“No need to lay it on so thick. You’re kind and beautiful yourself.”

“Me, the asshole ADA who just got a teenager who lived in abject terror of her mother to —”

“Rafa.” She grasped his hand, intertwining her fingers with his. “Here’s what I knew. Here’s what was never in the papers, what I’ve never told to anyone: Mira kidnapped Eric when she was a 19-year-old law student in Minnesota, on track to be the youngest-ever JD to graduate from her school, when she gave up everything to save this little boy from her mob lawyer ex-boyfriend, his new wife, and their idiot families. He’s not her biological son, and she never had any legal rights to him.”

“My God,” Barba couldn’t help saying. 

“But what risks am I taking for myself and my own son now if I expose Walker?”

“Too many.”

“Mira came to New York, moved in with her sister who worked on Wall Street, and started at the police academy, where she hid in plain sight. She married Neil a few years later because she thought she needed to have a “nuclear family” so no one would ask too many questions about Eric. Neil never knew the truth. The only people who knew were me and her sister.”

“Where’s the sister?”

“London. She got the hell out of New York and changed her name after Mira was killed.”

“I’m sorry. I should have shared with you what I knew about Walker. But my ex told me in confidence, and said not to touch Walker with a ten-foot pole if I didn’t want to wind up at the bottom of the East River.”

“I understand. I do.” 

“Someday,” Barba said, “when you retire and I’m fed up with McCoy, we’ll start a consulting agency and solve all the cold cases.” 

That brought a smile to her face, a big one.

**Six Weeks Later**

“You know what? Screw you, Barba,” Benson said, pressing an open, gloved hand to his back, very nearly shoving him. 

He’d kissed her forehead and her heart immediately sank into her stomach, weighed down by disappointment, betrayal, another loss, another betrayal, another person she’d have to convince herself wasn’t worthy of her love of her despair. 

She’d stood there on the street for maybe thirty seconds, hot tears freezing on her eyelashes, disappointment boiling the fragments of her too-many-times broken heart, until she decided, furious, that she would not be _left_ again, she would not be _left_ for someone else’s good, she would not be _left_ so that another character in her story could resignedly start their life over, pursue something that was supposedly better, while she stayed where she was. 

Barba turned around, red-eyed, mouth open, stunned. 

“After what we talked about during the McLaughlin case, after six years, after all that’s between us, you can’t kiss me on the forehead and disappear from my life as if you were never in it.” She heard the raspiness in her own voice. “You, the one I’ve confided in, the one who _knows_ how I feel about people I love disappearing from my life overnight, you of all people should know better.”

Barba’s face crumpled and he started to cry, right there in on the street, right there outside the subway station. She wanted to comfort him, but willed herself not to be so stupid as to comfort what seemed like the millionth person to abandon her for greener pastures.

“Go,” she said. “Go wherever you’re “moving on” to. I understand if you need to move on from the DAs office, because god knows McCoy did not do right by you — but to move on from _me_ , and from Noah —“

He moved to embrace her but she wouldn’t let him.

“No. Just go. You’re to get in touch with me next week, you hear me?”

He nodded.

“You’re to call me, or text, or email, wherever you are, I don’t care, but you are not disappear from my life.”

“I thought it would be best for you if I —” he started to say, but his silent sobs wouldn’t let him finish, so he turned towards the subway entrance instead.

 _Lots of shit going on in my family that I wouldn’t want to drag you into_ , she remembered him telling her some eighteen years ago. _You seem like a very sweet, very smart, very dedicated person who should not be dragged into my shit._

—

He texted her exactly one week later, almost to the minute: _In Miami, staying with a friend until this mess blows over. Making some calls to law firms._

She didn’t respond. At two o’clock in the morning, she heard her phone chime. 

_At Eddie Garcia’s cousin’s place. He’s a defense attorney, maybe can get me work with his firm when I’m ready. It’s him and me and another lawyer, a woman who’s not allowed to live in her own house anymore because of a nasty divorce she can’t get settled. We’ve named this apartment The Temporary Home for Sad Lawyers._

He’d kept his promise to her. He’d fully checked in. 

And, a few minutes later, he texted again: _I love you_. 

She flopped her head back down on the pillow. 

2:30 AM: _I’m sorry I put you in a position where you had to fix the worst mistake I ever made, one that impacted a lot of lives._

2:35 AM: _When you’re ready, call me._

She didn’t. After the suddenness of his bad decision, of his resignation, of his departure, she wasn’t ready.


	3. Staten Island Ferry

In late February, Daniel Zadon, a 37-year-old bookkeeper at a private school in Manhattan, was ROR’ed on charges of sexual assault of a minor. Daniel should never have been working at a school in the first place: there was a 25-year history of similar charges against him in Florida and New York. 

And, Daniel should never have been ROR’ed either, but SVU didn’t have a dedicated ADA yet. McCoy had pushed to hire the special prosecutor who’d special-prosecuted Barba to tears on the stand, but an investigation into his past revealed that he’d abetted a rape when he played major league baseball more than a decade ago. The attorney did not understand why this “error in judgment” precluded him from taking the job, and returned to Chicago with his tail between his legs. 

Benson had already approached a bureau chief about offering Carisi a position at the ADA’s office, which she promised to do by spring. 

The ADA they were assigned couldn’t get bail, and couldn’t even convince the judge to get Daniel to surrender his passport. The next day, Daniel disappeared. NYPD, and, soon afterwards, the feds who’d been brought in, were unable to locate him. 

Carisi was looking into Daniel’s uncle. Will Zadon was a corporate lawyer who had, according to several acquaintances, taken Daniel in when his mother died, when the boy was only ten years old. Will, according to what Carisi had heard, was more fiercely loyal to Daniel than he was to any of his five children, presumably because of promises he’d made to his sister a long time ago. 

Twelve years ago, Will’s daughter Dara, backed by her brother Geoff, alleged that Daniel had molested her and her two younger sisters throughout their childhood. 

Will fought Dara and Geoff at every turn. 

Will’s three daughters learned that they were less worthy of protection than his beloved Daniel, and Daniel continued to live with the family. 

Dara and Geoff Zadon’s efforts ultimately amounted to nothing. The cops and lawyers in Florida and points north told them that the statute of limitations was up. A month later, Will moved himself, his wife, their two minor children, and Daniel from Miami to New York City. 

All the charges and complaints against Daniel in Florida were dropped or withdrawn, and sealed. 

“He never should have been working at a school,” an agitated Carisi told Benson. “But the background checks turned up nothing, thanks to the uncle and his connections. The principal said Daniel had reliable references, too, a glowing letter of recommendation from the principal of a local charter school.” 

The kicker: three months after the rest of the Zadons moved to New York, 23-year-old Geoff was shot in an alley behind a Tallahassee bar. 

Geoff, who’d remained in Florida in order to attend law school, had gone out for a smoke and was killed when a mugging went wrong. 

“Bullshit,” Carisi said when he read about the case. 

Carisi learned that there was one detective in Tallahassee who was convinced that Will had ordered a hit on Geoff, but she could never prove her theory, especially after the perp was arrested and confessed to killing Geoff in the process of robbing him. 

“Why would anyone want to rob a law student?” Carisi asked. “Even twelve years ago, how much cash could a full-time law student have been carrying on him?” 

Benson had never seen Carisi so frustrated by a case. “It’s out of our hands now,” she said, “unless the feds find Daniel.”

“Yeah, right. They couldn’t even get the judge to confiscate Daniel’s passport. Where do think he went, Massapequa?”

“I know we’ve all had a rough time lately —”

“And McCoy won’t find us an experienced special victims prosecutor who gets that in special victims cases, families are sometimes completely off on where their priorities are supposed to be.”

“We are all —”

“The thing with Barba, though, that I never saw coming.” He paused to look down at Benson, who was signing papers spread across her desk, her left hand closed tightly, absentmindedly slamming into the hard surface. “Sorry, Captain, look at me, pouring salt into an open wound.” 

She’d taken the captain’s exam the previous fall, when her world was still relatively in order. Ten days after Barba left, she finally got her promotion, the promotion she deserved, the promotion she’d earned. 

“It’s all right.” She stood from behind her desk and walked over to the window, gazing into the empty interrogation room. “He’s in Miami.”

“Who, Zadon?”

“Barba.”

“You heard from him?”

“He’s staying with a friend there until he pulls it together.”

“Good, good — did you —” He bit his lower lip. “None of my business.”

“He texted me and I haven’t answered yet.”

“I mean, look, Barba helped me through a lot after Dodds died, when I blamed myself for not going on that call.”

“Carisi,” she said, a hint of sympathy creeping into her voice, “the outcome might not have been any different for you.”

“I had lots of experience with DV unlawful imprisonment back on Staten Island, but anyway, look, I can’t say what came over him, what made him —”

“Let’s not worry about Barba. Let’s worry about McCoy finding us a new prosecutor.”

“Agreed,” Carisi said.

“Maybe you.”

“Me?”

“Why else would you have gone to law school at night for five years?”

“Yeah, well.”

“You should go for it,” Benson said. 

“Give me a few more weeks. Listen, I’ve got more that might help us on the Zadon case. There’s one person who knows more about what happened to Geoff that night at the bar. His girlfriend was also a law student at FSU, and she was there with him. She gave a statement to the detectives in Tallahassee, but all of that’s sealed.”

“Are we stepping on Tallahassee’s toes if we interview her?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Problem is, a year after she graduated, she married Geoff’s twin brother Joseph. According to a nondisclosure agreement in her and Joseph’s divorce, she’s not allowed to talk about Geoff’s murder.”

“Wow,” Benson said, unable to find any other words. 

“Yeah, so what it boils down to is that for some reason, Joseph Zadon didn’t want his ex-wife talking about his brother’s — her ex-boyfriend’s — murder.” 

“Hey, Carisi,” Benson said, sitting again and leaning back in her office chair, “how do you know what’s in a private divorce agreement?”

“Fordham. I’ve got people.”

“Tread lightly,” she warned. “So lightly you don’t leave footprints.”

—

Two weeks later, when a bitter winter chill had not yet left New York City even as spring approached, Carisi stood outside the 16th Precinct station, studying a row of pastries through a coffee cart window. His phone buzzed in his pocket; he answered it and turned around to find himself facing Benson, who came down to the cart most mornings for something better than the muddy coffee always on in the squadroom. 

“What’s up?” she asked when Carisi shoved his phone in his pocket. 

“Will Zadon’s body was found near a dumpster by the Staten Island Ferry port this morning.”

“Revenge killing?”

“Could be one of Daniel’s victims, or their parents, out for revenge. Can I take Rollins with me?”

“She and Fin are headed to a meeting with our ADA-of-the-week. I’ll tag along. Let me run back upstairs and get my stuff.”

When they arrived at the ferry terminal, Benson was startled to see traffic cordoned off in a six-block arc around the southern tip of Manhattan, with FBI and Homeland Security spread out as far as Battery Park. “What’s your business here?” one of the Homeland Security officers asked Benson and Carisi.

“Captain Olivia Benson, Special Victims Unit. My squad was investigating Daniel Zadon and, since Daniel’s disappearance, his uncle.”

“Who?”

“This is an NYPD case. The body found near the port.”

“Right, right, the body from this morning. I think your CSU guys got some of what they wanted, but we had to clear NYPD out of here fifteen minutes ago. We’re doing our best to leave your crime scene undisturbed. You heard of the guy who’s been stealing New Jersey commuter ferries since 1975?”

“No,” Benson said. 

“There’s a guy who’s been stealing New Jersey commuter ferries since 1975. He just stole the Staten Island Ferry.”

“But our crime scene —” Benson started to say. 

“Like I said, ma’am, we’ll try our best to preserve it.”

Carisi squinted into the distance. “Are there passengers on the ferry?”

“No, thank God he only steals ‘em empty. Historically returns them a couple days later, but right now he’s got a five-story, 2800-ton ferry that’s already made it out to the Atlantic Ocean. You guys aren’t getting to your crime scene before sunset.”

“Shit,” Carisi muttered.

“Come on,” Benson offered, “I’ll buy you a donut while I share this news with Captain Dodds.”

They started for the subway, and were only a block away when the Homeland Security officer caught up with them. “Hey, uh, Captain, my guys found another body.”

“I’m never eating breakfast,” Carisi complained.

The officer waved them through. “Floater,” he told them, turning his head from the body. “You recognize her? Any relation to your case?”

Benson and Carisi turned to each other and shrugged.

“We need to get CSU and the ME back down here now.”

“We can’t allow that until —”

“With the body drying here on the dock, the ME’s not going to be able to determine a time of death.” 

Thanks to the floater, whatever tragic end she may have met, Benson and Carisi were able to examine their crime scene and determine, with CSU’s help, that Zadon had likely been killed somewhere else and left behind a dumpster at the ferry port. 

The body of the twenty-something woman was taken to the ME’s for identification. Benson doubted that she had anything to do with Zadon, but feared her case would wind up with SVU nevertheless. _We’ll get a little bit of justice in your name_ , she thought, knowing there could never be enough justice done for someone lost so young.

“When Will’s son Geoff was killed outside that bar, the bartender and a couple other patrons went into the alley to see what happened after they heard a gunshot,” Carisi told Benson. “They found Geoff behind a dumpster.”

“So a revenge killing, but not for the reason we thought.”

—

In the afternoon, Carisi, who’d finally acquired a breakfast pastry for himself, interviewed Will’s wife Cordelia, who furiously defended both Will and Daniel. “You bring me down here like this, a widow, I have to plan my husband’s funeral and you’ve got me at a police station. You have no soul.”

“This is all routine,” Carisi tried to assure her. “Do you know where your son Joseph is?”

“In Miami. How dare you. First you accuse Daniel —”

“How did Joseph feel about Will back when Geoff was murdered?”

“How dare you,” she repeated. “Joseph grieved for his brother, he was depressed and miserable after Geoff was killed — by a mugger, mind you, there’s a man in jail who confessed to everything in front of a judge — but what got to him even more was when the police questioned Will, as if Will would ever do anything like that to his own kids. He was the most protective father you’ll ever meet.”

“And your three daughters?”

“Dara’s in Florida. Molly lives with me, she was with me all night, and Hallie lives in Jersey. My kids had nothing to do with Will’s murder.”

“Even Dara, who accused —”

“I’m calling my lawyer. There are court orders that say that you do not get to ask about those “accusations,” which had to do with Geoff getting in too deep with people in law school who put funny ideas in his head. You do not get to ask about the lies that he and Dara tried to tell.”

“Mrs. Zadon —”

“Enough,” she interrupted. “Will knew every judge in this county. I’ll have your badge, swear to God, if you violate any of the court orders.”

\---

Carisi had no luck with any of the Zadons, who were apparently all sworn to secrecy by court orders. To him, it was telling that Dara had no plans to fly in for Will’s funeral, but his hands were tied by the courts, probably by all those judges Will knew personally. 

Within a few days, the feds had taken over the Zadon case entirely. Two states, a murder, and a missing perp who had probably left the United States altogether meant that the case was out of Manhattan SVU’s hands. 

Ordinarily, Benson would have fought the feds (and Dodds) on jurisdiction. Daniel was theirs to bring to justice. Benson wanted to see him convicted on behalf of his prior victims, too, the ones who had been swept under the rug in Will’s overzealous defense of his nephew. But between the aftereffects of Noah’s kidnapping, Barba’s trial and hasty departure, and being forced to make a life-or-death decision on behalf of a child waiting for a heart transplant, the first three months of the year had left her exhausted.

The other body, the floater, was identified as Amy McCormick, a 26-year-old with a history of Internet fraud and privacy violations. She’d been missing for six months, but, according to the ME, had been dead for less than a week when they’d found her. Her body showed no signs of a struggle. River current patterns suggested that Amy jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, and investigators decided that she must have done so after six months dodging summonses and court dates. 

Benson felt some relief, in a sense, that Amy’s death had nothing to do with SVU. 

Until, that is, Benson got a phone call that would send her in ten thousand directions at once.


	4. Sinking Ship

Sitting on the floor of Santiago Garcia’s apartment in Miami three weeks after he’d resigned from the DA’s office, Barba felt an ounce of levity for the first time in months. “Fan fiction?” he asked, sipping his scotch and swallowing hard. 

“Fan fiction,” Santiago echoed. 

Santiago, Eddie’s younger cousin, who Barba had assisted with law school applications and guided through a number of major life changes fifteen years ago, was now a defense attorney, a very successful defense attorney, in fact. 

“The case started with —”

“Wait wait wait,” Santiago’s friend and colleague Laura Burgos interrupted, waving a finger in his direction as she swallowed the last of her wine. 

Barba’s back was to the sofa, legs out in front of him, glass in hand. He wasn’t sad. 

“You have to tell the story so the fan fiction part comes in last,” Laura insisted. “It doesn’t pack a punch unless you tell the story and then say, _the reason she did all this horrible stuff was because of fan fiction_.” 

Laura was staying in the apartment too, sleeping in Santiago’s guest room while her four-bedroom house remained empty because of a viciously contested, never-ending divorce that she didn’t like to talk about. With Barba sleeping on the sofa bed, Santiago’s apartment had become a Temporary Home for Sad Lawyers.

Rita Calhoun sat across from and above Barba on the loveseat, her legs curled in carefully underneath her. She was allegedly in Miami on vacation. Barba understood that she’d probably come to visit for moral support, but, unsure of where his morality lay these days, he didn’t know how deserving of that moral support, of that degree of friendship, he was.

“Florida,” Rita said, reaching across the coffee table for the wine bottle.

Barba flashed Rita his middle finger, and the remaining lawyers laughed. 

He’d done what Benson had asked: a week after he arrived, he’d texted her to let her know exactly where he was. She didn’t answer. At two o’clock in the morning, the degree to which he’d broken her heart finally cut through the selfishness that had encrusted his soul after his trial. _I love you_ , he’d texted. He sent another message, then tried to call the next afternoon. A week had gone by and still, nothing. 

“You tell it then,” Santiago said to Laura. 

“Okay. For a minute, forget we said anything about about fan fiction,” Laura said, patting Barba’s leg. 

Rita shot Laura a death glare.

“So —” 

“He’s too old for you,” Rita interrupted. 

Barba cleared his throat. “Rita.”

“What? It’s true.”

“I’m 34,” Laura said, flashing a sarcastic grin in Rita’s direction. 

“Rafael’s 48 and creaky.”

“Laura, please ignore Rita’s ridiculous assumptions and continue your story,” Barba said. 

“Besides,” Santiago chimed in, “48 divided by 2 is 24, plus 7 is 31. Isn’t that the rule? So you’re absolutely fine, with three years’ leeway on top of that.”

“Nothing is happening!” Laura said. “Do you want me to finish this story or not?”

“Go ahead,” Rita said, her death glare still partially in place.

“And for your information, Ms. Calhoun, I don’t appreciate when women in their 40s or 50s talk to all women younger than them as if they’re uniformly seventeen years old. I’m an associate at one of the top firms in this city and can hold my own.”

“All right, all right, sustained.” Rita raised her glass in Laura’s direction. “You absolutely do not have my blessing, but I’ll shut up.”

“Rita’s a hardcore Barba-Benson shipper,” Santiago said.

Barba almost choked on his scotch. 

“We had to have a paralegal make a glossary of fan fiction terminology for everyone on the case,” Laura explained, apparently desperate to change the subject.

“Let’s get back to the story,” Barba said, “please.”

“Thank you.” Laura slid over a few inches, putting some distance between her and Barba to avoid incurring any more of Rita’s wrath. “So this teacher comes to us in a panic because his 25-year-old daughter has gotten herself into a lot of trouble. The Attorney General was filing 16 counts of fraud against her, and that was only for the sake of protecting her from worse charges that might come down the line if the feds took over the case. She’d been posting online as a 45-year-old attorney and dispensing legal advice. She collected some money, but that was all incidental: she told her online friends that one of her “kids” had a rare disease that Taylor Swift sang about once, and somebody started a GoFundMe for the fake kid. But she donated all the funds to a real cancer research foundation. We were able to get most of the fraud charges dropped.”

“But the ones we couldn’t get dropped,” Santiago said, “were because she had ran a website for a fake legal firm where she — or her character, her online persona — dispensed legal advice, usually bad legal advice.”

“To the point that she didn’t know that pleading no contest is effectively the same as a guilty plea,” Laura said. 

“Holy shit.” Rita leaned forward, now very much into the story. “She was giving bad legal advice, and violating all kinds of privacy statutes.”

“Mm-hmm.” Laura took the wine bottle from Rita and poured the last of it into her glass. “And what’s amazing, what’s got us banging our heads against our desks at the office, is that nobody she interacted with had any clue she was a fraud.”

“Like they said back in the 90s, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

“Please,” Santiago called from the kitchen, where he’d gone to dig up another bottle of wine, “our client had fuzzy ears and a wagging tail. The people she gave legal advice to chose not to see that.”

“She’s still your client?” Barba asked. “This is a good enough story to risk ethical violations over?”

“Yes,” Santiago and Laura said at the same time. 

“Besides,” Santiago added, “she’s not our client anymore, not unless she comes back. She’s been missing for a while. State police are investigating, but we all think she hightailed it out of the country. And whatever we say is not going beyond this room anyway. Anybody here after a judicial appointment?”

“Nope,” Barba said, raising his glass.

He’d put his name on the list for New York State judicial appointments two years ago, just after he’d been cleared of wrongdoing in the Abreu matter. At the time, he was assured he’d be appointed to a bench within five years. Now, he was sure, his name had been scrubbed from that list. He was lucky not to have been disbarred.

“Continue,” he told Laura when sudden sympathy sprang up in Rita’s eyes.

“So, a whole mess of privacy violations, because the people who communicated with her thought there was a defense attorney on the other end. A defense attorney who’d had her first eight children, a set of quadruplets and two sets of twins, before she was 20. This lawyer started as a character the woman made up for an online forum when she was 11 years old.”

“Yikes,” was all Rita could offer.

“She had twenty-four children and was pregnant with her twenty-fifth when she and her husband were killed in the California wildfires. Her followers wanted to send money to the family, but when they couldn’t find an obituary or any news reports, that’s when the scam started to unravel, and that’s when a whole lot of people realized they’d gotten a whole lot of bad legal advice. Now, when she made up the character, it was originally for a private online forum. She later posted as her on an online pregnancy site. Turns out half the people on childbirth sites are never-been-pregnant teenagers pretending to be women in their 30s with lots of drama in their pretend lives. That alone was a revelation.”

“The time and budget available to defense attorneys never ceases to amaze me,” Barba said.

Barba found himself smiling for the first time in weeks. Laura had been reserved, more quiet than her personality suggested during the two weeks he’d known her. The circumstances of her divorce, which he hadn’t pried into, had apparently been very rough. But now, as she told the story, she was animated, excited, closer to her usual self, or maybe the self she’d once been, Barba guessed.

Rita’s death glare fixed on Barba this time. He ignored it.

“When she was 18,” Laura continued, “she started writing fan fiction for CSI, you know, that procedural drama that was on for 500 years. Her reviews were mostly negative at first, so she told everyone that she was a lawyer with 20 kids, the character she’d already been using to get attention on pregnancy message boards. She made friends in the fanfic community, and within a few months, was one of the most popular writers on the site.”

Santiago laughed. “Except for the two or three people who suspected that a 45-year-old lawyer with 24 kids and seven grandkids who had at least one rare medical condition a year might not be real.”

“So the story here, the way you’ve got to tell it,” Laura explained, waving her hands animatedly, “is that she dispensed bad legal advice, violated dozens of people’s privacy, mierda muy seria, all for the sake of people liking her CSI fan fiction.”

The four attorneys (“what’s the collective noun for a group of attorneys?” Rita had wondered at one point, following her own question with a “don’t answer that”) laughed and chatted and drank for another hour. Rita left just after 11, but not before hugging Barba and muttering “don’t do anything stupid” into his ear. 

“I’ve already committed enough stupidity to last a lifetime,” he assured her. 

“And you call me, not Dworkin, when you’re ready to sue Jack McCoy for mental anguish for his overzealous prosecution of you.”

“New York State statutes don’t leave much room for mental anguish.”

“You let me take care of it. When you’re ready. And when you’re ready, call me so I can set up an interview for you with one of our senior partners.”

After Rita left, Santiago and his houseguests cleaned up the mess they’d made on the coffee table. Santiago went to bed and Barba took a shower to try to ease the chill that had crept into his bones despite the temperate weather. As he was pulling on pajama pants, he heard a _crack_ in the kitchen.

He threw on a white undershirt and hurried into the kitchen to find Laura at the table, her face pressed into both of her hands, her forehead and cheeks a deep red. “Hey,” he said, gently approaching her, laying an open hand on her shoulder, ready to retract it if she shuddered for even a moment at his touch, “anything I can do to help?”

She shook her head _no_ from beneath her hands. 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she said, standing and embracing Barba. He wrapped his arms around her, and she sank further into the embrace, wiping her tear-stained cheek on his undershirt. “I’ve been talking about it, in more and more detail, more detail than any judge in Florida or New York or anywhere along I-95 would require, for three years now, and I’ve had a headache for at least 900 days, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Then don’t.”

She looked up at him. “I broke my phone, Rafi,” she said, a half-laugh, half-sob escaping from her throat. “My former mother-in-law called for the third time today, and it’s almost midnight, and I threw the phone across the room and —”

“It’s okay.” Thinking only to comfort her, Barba kissed the top of Laura’s forehead. When he recalled the significance of that particular gesture, he shivered, nauseated by the thought that he and his fellow resident of the Home for Abogados Tristes had been flirting for at least a week to combat their individual miseries. But maybe, maybe that wasn’t so bad. “Where’d the phone go?”

“No lo sé,” she said with a shrug.

“Y no te importa?”

“No.”

She lifted her head and nuzzled his neck. He didn’t mind her lips and nose resting there, and didn’t mind the gentle kisses that followed, a little enjoyment now that all his other hopes — Olivia, the bench, a storied, well-respected prosecutorial career — had been flushed down the toilet. Laura still had a future, though, regardless of what was happening with her ex-husband, and why, _why_ was he flushing from head to toe?

Laura kissed his lips. “You’re not looking for anything, right?”

“Your phone?” he suggested, raising an eyebrow.

That made her laugh. “You’re cute, Rafi.” 

She knew him as Rafi because Santiago, through Eddie, knew him as Rafi, but still, the name made him feel young again: young as in, that brief period between ages 23 and 28 when the troubles of his youth neither weighed down on nor had yet caught up to him. He wanted Laura to forget her own troubles, and searched for spots along her jawline and collarbone that made her want draw him closer. 

With her hands planted firmly on his ass, she pulled him towards her. “Bedroom,” she whispered.

“Bedroom,” he agreed.

He had to admit to himself that he was enjoying Laura’s eagerness, the way she pulled him into the bedroom, sat him down on the bed, his back to the headboard, ground herself down on his hand, and slyly complimented him on how big his fingers were. With her thumbs in the waistband of his boxers, she grinned. 

“You flatter an old man,” he joked. 

“Yeah,” was all she said, a shallow, fluttery-eyed gasp when he pressed his thumb to her sex, mouthing at her breasts as she removed her tank top. Then, with her eyes shut tight, she let out a grunt.

He caught his breath and asked her if she was all right.

“I’m _wonderful_ ,” she told him. “Please, Rafi, I need more, I need to forget —”

An uncomfortable head-to-toe flush hit him again — panic? — followed by a wave of nausea so strong that he had to leap up and run to the bathroom. 

When he returned to the bedroom, Laura was standing, arms folded, tank top back on, face folded in worry. 

Barba was shivering. 

She walked up to him and put a hand on his forehead. 

“I haven’t believed in divine punishment or divine anything since confirmation class,” she said, “but I think you’ve got the flu.”

—

By morning he had a fever of 103 and a breathless cough, so Santiago dragged him to a doctor, who prescribed Tamiflu in the hopes of cutting his week to ten days of misery in half. Barba spent the next two days under the covers on the sofa bed while Santiago and Laura pestered him and made lawyerly arguments about eating and drinking. On the third day, he was able to get out of bed and shuffle into the kitchen. He went right for the coffeemaker. 

“Rafi,” Laura said, and he jumped when he realized she’d been sitting behind him, working on her laptop at the kitchen table. “Coffee? It’s nine o’clock. At night.”

“Caffeine withdrawal headache,” he said.

“Not that it’s any of my business, but don’t you have to watch for dehydration?”

He opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of water from the filter pitcher before starting a pot of coffee. “Would you and Santiago also like to know how many times I peed today?”

“I was going to ask what color it was,” Laura said, a smirk on her lips, her eyes still fixed on her computer screen. 

“Are you all right?” he asked, sitting at the table while he waited for the coffee to brew.

She pinched her nose and stuck out her tongue. “Take a shower,” she said. “You smell like VapoRub and sadness.”

“Do you have any flu symptoms?”

“No,” she assured him. “I must have been lucky. Got my phone fixed, by the way.” She patted the smartphone next to her laptop.

“You need anything, you let me know,” he said, his voice still hoarse from coughing. “I mean, anything besides —”

She interrupted his thought with a laugh. “That was probably a bad idea, as evidenced by your immediately throwing up and coming down with the fly.”

“I was having fun beforehand,” he promised, and a smile spread across her face.

“So was I. That little bit of “fun” you gave me was more than I had in a very long time. But, still a bad idea.” She rubbed her temples. “900-day headache. No, much longer than that. Three thousand days, maybe. You have enough headaches of your own, you don’t need any of mine.”

His heart broke for Laura.

She pressed a hand to her own shoulder and massaged her neck. “May I?” he asked, and she nodded.

He washed his hands, glancing over at the coffeepot, then stood behind Laura, pressing his thumbs into the joints that connected her neck and shoulders, gently at first, then adding a little more pressure. She let out an “ahh.” He felt her muscles relax beneath his touch.

“Tell me more about fan fiction,” he said when an accidental glance at her computer screen revealed not work, but a section of a divorce agreement.

She closed the laptop. Although the coffee was ready, Barba continued to massage her shoulders and the back of her head. “It was a bizarre case,” she said. “Out of our hands now, but I still worry about Amy.”

“Your anonymous client,” he corrected.

“We’ll call this a consult. No ethical breach. Go get your coffee.”

He pressed into one more knot in her shoulder before returning to the counter to pour himself a cup of coffee. “You want a cup?” he asked.

“It’s nine o’clock. It’ll keep me up all night.”

“Okay.” He took his cup and sat with her. “I can’t imagine worrying about a client who defrauded dozens of people. Probably makes you an excellent defense attorney.”

“I had a psychologist who we use as an expert witness talk to her, and she couldn’t help us out. There’s no evidence of psychopathy or sociopathy, even though it really seems that way to a layperson. They call it “confabulation,” but in her case it wasn’t done entirely for attention, or money, it was so she could get more likes on her fanfiction. It was tough to make a case that she wasn’t just a jerk who didn’t know when to stop.”

“No family background that could have suggested psych issues, at least to a jury or the AG?”

“There was something we were going to try, but then Amy disappeared.”

“Tell me. I’m studying up on being a defense attorney.”

“You? You’ve got the heart of a prosecutor.”

“Is that an insult?” he asked, laughing through a cough.

“I just can’t picture you as a defense attorney. I can’t see you on our side. Have you ever thought about the bench?”

“My abuelita did. She called me “el juez”.” 

“Aww, that’s sweet.”

“That’s all, well, that’s all over and done with now.”

“You overstepped ethical boundaries for sure,” she said, “but if I were your attorney, if I were Rita, I’d get the baby’s mother on the stand and —”

“Laura. There are things you don’t want to talk about, and there are things I don’t want to talk about.”

“Sorry.” She patted his hand. “I understand.”

“There are civil suits filed against me, anyway. Rita and I will disagree on this, but that family doesn’t deserve to be put through any more misery.”

“Neither do you.”

“Thank you.” He choked back a few unintended tears and sipped his coffee. “And you, too. No more misery. I mean it.”

“So, Amy,” she said, trying to brighten her voice, presumably for his sake, “raised by a single mother in Miami Gardens, product of a secret extramarital affair. Her mother dies of breast cancer when Amy’s only 13, father comes down here to be her guardian even though they’ve only met once or twice before. But Dad, he’s a moron. He cares about her, retained the best firm in town, obviously, but he’s a moron. On top of all that, her half-brother was released from prison around the same time her father came here. He was in his mid-twenties and came to live with them too. This guy had served five years for killing his mother, five years of a ten-year sentence, was fully exonerated because of complete malpractice on the part of detectives and prosecutors. So there’s something to be said for her family background.”

Barba had suddenly stopped drinking his coffee.

“What?” Laura prompted.

“Amy’s father came down here from New York.”

“Yes, why? Don’t tell me —”

“Not directly. Was Amy’s father married to Lieutenant Mira Margolis?”

Laura flipped her laptop back open, and for a good two minutes, searched through her files. “Yes,” she said, her mouth hanging open. “The half-brother was convicted of murdering his mother, Lieutenant Mira Margolis. Conviction was overturned a year before Margolis’s husband moved to Miami.”

_Amy and her half-brother are not biologically related_ , Barba thought, realizing that he knew much more about the family than Laura and Santiago, Amy’s own defense attorneys.

He knew what Benson had told him. 

“Rafi?” Laura asked.

But to tell Laura what he knew might mean betraying Benson’s confidence.

He’d done enough of that already. 

“Confidentiality, I get it,” Laura said.

“It’s more of a confidence shared with me by —”

“Olivia,” she guessed.

“Yes.”

“It’s okay. The other night, we were looking for an escape, both of us from very different situations. You thought it was over between you and one of those great, epic, destiny-crushing loves.”

“You describe it so dramatically.”

“I had a love like that once,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I was young and stupid and trusting. His murder was the reason I became a defense attorney.”

To Barba, it seemed strange that the murder of someone’s young love would inspire them to become a defense attorney, not a prosecutor, but he knew better than to say anything more than “I’m sorry.”

“Seeing this now, this connection between the Margolis case and Amy’s” — she squinted again at her screen, an expression of disbelief plastered on her face — “I told you, I probably haven’t believed in signs from heaven since confirmation class, but this is enough to, ah, win me over to Rita’s side.”

“Rita’s side,” he repeated, sipping his coffee and trying to hide his embarrassment behind the cup. 

“To a Rafael Barba and Olivia Benson shipper. Now you need a good ship name.”

“That “ship” has sailed. I punched a big hole in it. Hundió toda la maldita cosa. If it wasn’t for this stupid flu, I —“

“We’d have been together a night, a few nights, it would have been good, but nether of us was looking for more than a couple of rounds of great sex anyway.”

“You deserve more.”

“At this point in my life,” she said, “I just want really good sex.”

“I mean, look —” he started to offer, but he thought of Liv, her smile, the smile he wanted to restore to her face, the holes in her heart, in their _ship_ , that he wanted so much to mend. Laura was right; they were after very different things. 

She’d had a great love, she’d experienced loss, and grief, and very likely emotional abuse. All those years as a prosecutor, all those years working with Olivia Benson, rather, he recognized the signs. His only great requited love had crumbled many years ago, also over asshole family members, but when it was over, at least it was _over_ , a small luxury Laura had not been granted. As for the unrequited love, that was still singing in the harbor, but maybe hadn’t drifted entirely out of his reach just yet. 

Even if he could just repair their friendship, he’d be happy. 

But he’d sent five texts, tried to call once, and she hadn’t responded to any of his attempts to reach out. He understood, and knew to stop trying, that if she wanted to talk, she’d come to him. 

“Olivi-a-ra,” Laura was saying, testing out the rhythms of different name combinations. “Rafi-li.” 

“What are you doing?”

“Figuring out a ship name.”

“A ship name.”

“Combining your names together. Rafi-li, Rafi-oli, RAFIOLI, that’s it! Your ship name is Rafioli!”

Barba laughed. “You sure I didn’t get you sick?”

“Get your ass back to New York.”

“When I feel better, I’ll take a week to figure out what I’m going to do about my job, the civil suits, my mother —”

“And Olivia.”

“And Olivia,” he said, a half-hearted promise. 

Laura squeezed his hand. “You can tell Rita I’m on Team Rafioli now.”


	5. Phone Call

Benson had no reason to think that the death Amy McCormick, the woman they’d found in the Hudson River while investigating Will Zadon’s murder, had anything to with her department. In fact, Amy’s death had been ruled a suicide by the ME. 

Until, that is, Laura Burgos called SVU and asked for Benson. 

She introduced herself as an associate on the team that had represented Amy McCormick in her fraud case. “They sent you to me?” Benson asked. “My detective and I happened to be on the scene when Homeland Security found her. We were investigating a different case, and so were they. Have you spoken to Lieutenant Bernard in Lower Manhattan?”

“Yes.”

“And he sent you to me?”

“I wanted to make sure the NYPD had the correct timeline.”

“Our MEs are the best. I’m sure you’re fine, Ms. Burgos.”

Benson sucked in a sharp breath when it dawned on her that the attorney she was speaking to shared a name with the girlfriend who had been with Geoff Zadon when he was killed twelve years ago. A Laura Burgos had called 911 after finding Geoff shot dead in the alley, left behind a dumpster. She’d supported Geoff and Dara in their accusations against Daniel. The same Laura Burgos married Geoff’s twin brother Joseph three years after the murder. 

This Laura Burgos was a defense attorney in Miami. 

A quick Internet search on Benson’s end turned up the name “Laura Burgos Zadon” associated with the same firm. She’d dropped the “Zadon” three years ago. 

Laura and Joseph’s divorce agreement allegedly kept her from discussing the Zadons. She wondered if Laura hadn’t recognized the fury that was in Will, what he was capable of doing to protect Daniel, until it was too late, until she’d already married Joseph. 

Maybe, Benson wondered in the pit of her seasoned detective gut, Laura wanted to say something about the Zadons but her tongue was tied by legal (and other) threats. 

“Ms. Burgos, I’m sure you already know that I was working the Zadon case before it was handed over to the feds, so whatever it is you want to tell me, please just tell me.”

She heard a gasp, a serious gasp, on the other end of the line.

“I — did — not —” Laura stammered.

A pause. A long one. Benson waited.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, per the conditions of my divorce, I am not allowed to talk about that family, and I’ll ask you to please understand that any communication we had just now was unintended.” Her voice was flatter, more matter-of-fact now. “I was contacted by a federal investigator, I provided an alibi, and have been cleared as a suspect in the case that we are not discussing.”

So Laura really had been calling on behalf of her client. 

Of all the bizarre —

“In the course of our work with Amy and her father, I spoke to Captain Walker, who’s retired here to South Florida, and he suggested I update you on who Amy McCormick is, because she was the product of an extramarital affair that her mother had with Neil Tiposi.”

“What?”

“Since you provided some critical evidence in the Margolis case —”

Benson stopped listening. What the hell did an SVU investigation involving a perp who’d fled the country, whose uncle had been murdered shortly afterwards, and the death by suicide of a woman who’d been negotiating fraud charges in Miami have to do with Mira? And obviously this Laura Burgos was lying about who’d tipped her off. Cal Walker had no interest in bringing the Margolis case back to life, especially considering what Barba had told Benson about him, that was one of the mobbed-up cops of the 80s and 90s who’d managed to get away with his sins and retire comfortably. 

But, having heard the utter panic in Laura’s voice at the mention of the Zadons, Benson decided not to ask any more questions. 

Laura filled Benson in on Amy’s story, on the nature of the fraud charges. 

“So,” Laura said, “given her family background —”

“I’ll suggest to Lieutenant Bernard that he might want to tell the ME to take a second look.”

“Thank you. And maybe —”

“I doubt this will have any effect on the cold case, Ms. Burgos, but I appreciate you bringing this to me.”

Laura Burgos was at the nexus of three cases: Mira Margolis, Amy McCormick, and the Zadons. 

Laura Burgos was a defense attorney in Miami. 

_Miami_.

The thought struck her as she rode the subway home that evening: Laura had called to tell her about the Amy McCormick-Mira Margolis connection not because of Captain Walker, who’d never have openly disclosed any of the connections, and who probably didn’t answer his phone for the sake of his pension, but —

Barba.

Her stomach soured a little.

Laura worked in Miami, a large, impossibly sprawly city. It was very, very, _very_ unlikely that she and Barba knew each other — wasn’t it?

Why had Barba betrayed something Benson had told him in confidence — Mira’s darkest secret, the one that might have gotten her killed — to a 30-something defense attorney?

Well.

Benson clenched her teeth and tried to let the metallic squeaking of the subway drown out the possibilities that were crossing her mind. 

That wasn’t like Barba, though, to hook up with a younger woman defense attorney and spill someone else’s confidences, no matter how much they might help her case along. 

Then again, flipping the switch on an infant with whom he had no familial connections wasn’t like Barba either. 

Neither was leaving the way he did.

She remembered the young ADA she’d met in 1999, the trouble that refused to leave his eyes, the balled up hand in his pocket, the cigarette breath, the fear, the resignation that he’d been forced to carry too much on his shoulders. 

If he’d found some comfort there in Miami, some escape, then good, she convinced herself. She imagined he’d find a job there too. 

—-

At the start of his fifth week in Miami, Barba had a Zoom interview with the senior partners at Rita Calhoun’s firm. Three days later, they called to tell him that they were ready to hire him as an associate. He accepted the job offer and took his apartment in Manhattan off the market.

Laura, meanwhile, received an offer on her and her ex-husband’s house, a property which had been very reluctantly conceded to her six months earlier. They’d both be leaving Santiago’s apartment within a week.

Barba caught Laura in the kitchen at 11 o’clock at night. She was working on her laptop and drinking his scotch. “Hey,” he said, “the owner of that scotch is trying to sleep.”

“I’ll buy you a bottle,” she promised. “A new-old bottle.”

“No te preocupes.”

“Rafael,” she said, wincing as she took another sip, “I think I made a mistake.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I called Olivia Benson.”

“Why?” he asked, a hint of anger creeping into his voice. 

“They found Amy, my client, the fanfic fraud girl, in the water near the Staten Island Ferry. The ME ruled it a suicide, said she’d probably jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and was carried there by the current. The report said the first detectives on the scene were Olivia Benson and Dominick Carisi. I wanted to tip Benson off to the connection between Amy and Mira Margolis.”

“So now Liv thinks I betrayed her trust again. Great.”

“You didn’t. I made up something about Captain Walker.”

“There’s no way Liv bought that.”

“I think she did.”

“Not a chance in hell.” He wasn’t about to tell anyone else what he knew about Cal Walker. “Trust me, she didn’t buy it.”

“In any case, it turns out the reason they were at the Staten Island Ferry terminal in the first place was that they were investigating the murder of Will Zadon.” 

“Who?”

“My father-in-law. Ex-father-in-law.”

Barba wrinkled his forehead and pressed his lips together, briefly closing his eyes. “How?” he finally asked.

“A very … unfortunate … connection.” For Laura, that warranted another sip of scotch. “I was trying to tip Olivia off to who Amy was, and then I heard her typing on the other end, and she says, “you know I’m working on the Zadon case,” and I swear to God I didn’t, I am absolutely not allowed to talk about them, especially not to law enforcement. I hope Olivia will respect that.”

“Is anybody in danger?”

“Hypothetically, yes.”

“Then brace yourself. She will not respect the conditions of your divorce.”

Laura eyes shifted nervously. “I can tell you, right?”

“It won’t leave this kitchen.”

“You won’t share my story with Olivia?”

“Unless you want me to.”

“Even though I told her about Amy’s father?”

“I swear on my abuelita’s grave.”

For Laura, that promise seemed to be enough. She closed her laptop. “Manhattan SVU was investigating my ex’s cousin, Daniel, who lived with the family,” she explained. She told Barba about her relationship with Geoff in law school, Geoff’s murder behind a bar near FSU, her foolish decision to marry Geoff’s twin brother Joseph three years later, her slow descent into the misery of a smart, stubborn woman caught in Will Zadon’s orbit, the miserable, constant headache that had not been remedied — that had been worsened, in fact — by the divorce. 

“I don’t know the Florida statutes,” Barba said, “but you were a witness to a murder. In New York, I could get your whole divorce agreement thrown out the window.”

“You can’t,” she said, “not even in New York. Will had judges up and down the East Coast who adored him. He shows them a completely different face than he shows his family. I know it’s hard to —”

“It’s not hard to believe at all. I worked special victims cases for twenty years, twenty-one, almost.”

Laura chocked back tears. “Do you know you are the first person who’s let me tell my story without demanding more and more detail after every sentence?” She reached a hand across the table and Barba squeezed it. “Usually I have to go back fifteen years and answer a thousand questions before some people are willing to believe me.”

“Even your sister-in-law, the one who —”

“She had no more contact with the family after Geoff was killed. So you’re the only one.”

“You were a witness to a murder,” Barba repeated. “There must be a way.”

“Three years ago, I might have agreed.”

“Between you and me, hypothetically, do you believe Will Zadon ordered a hit on his son?”

“Hard to say. Was it a hit? Probably. Was it Will? I can’t say for sure. Is Will capable of doing something like that to protect Daniel? Absolutely.”

Barba didn’t push further. Laura, gazing into her glass, continued after a few deep breaths. “Will is a manipulative, controlling pendejo who makes sure everybody in the family and everybody who works for him knows not to cross him. He did little things to his kids to make sure they remembered who was in charge — minor insults, a lot of them, baiting them into arguments they couldn’t win, constantly criticizing their choices in clothing, education, spending habits, dating — all things that look insignificant individually but add up after years and years of never letting up. You get to a point where you can’t make decisions on your own anymore, where you’re afraid for no logical reason. But all of it hid the truth about Daniel, how protecting Daniel was always his first priority, no matter what.”

“I’m sorry,” Barba said, shaking his head.

“Will’s M.O. was always emotional abuse as a means of protecting Daniel from credible accusations of sexual assault. He let a lot of things happen, especially to Dara and Molly. But I can’t say for sure whether he’d have had one of his sons killed.”

“I trust you,” Barba assured her. “You were in that family for years, so you know better than anyone.”

“Olivia Benson trained you well,” Laura said with a smile.

Barba rolled his eyes. “Twenty years in special victims has trained me well.”

“You’re really going to work for Rita Calhoun? You’re a family court judge, Rafi. That’s how I see you. So does Santiago.”

“That possibility is off the table for me now.”

“But you were found not guilty.”

“I was sanctioned by the Bar association for interfering with the case. Two years ago, I was sanctioned and suspended for a month because of a “loan” I gave to a drug addicted witness. She died of an overdose, and I made sure her daughter didn’t have to drop out of school.”

“Speaks to your good heart.”

“A good heart doesn’t get you appointed to a bench in New York State. Interfering in cases as a prosecutor, that’ll —”

“What about “el juez”?” Laura reminded him. 

“My grandmother was 85.”

“But she was right.”

“So your divorce agreement,” he said, returning to their original topic of discussion, “that clause. It’s all about keeping secret what you know about Geoff?”

“About Geoff’s murder, about Daniel.”

“It’s asking you to keep quiet about your knowledge of multiple crimes. That can’t possibly be binding.”

“One crime where someone’s already been convicted, and with most of the others, except the one Daniel’s currently charged with, the statute of limitations has long since passed. I hope Manhattan SVU gets Daniel on the newest charges, but the ADAs there couldn’t get bail and Daniel’s gone, probably left the country.”

Barba shuffled over to the dish rack to grab himself a tumbler. “I don’t want to press you, but can I ask you what you saw that night, what you would have said on the stand? If you can’t, I —”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Laura said, pouring scotch into his glass. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this who doesn’t press me.”

He lifted his glass. “To Olivia Benson,” he joked.

“To the good ship Rafioli,” she added, clinking her glass with his. 

“You don’t think “Barson” works better?” 

“Nope. Rafioli.”

Barba laughed. “Laura,” he said, “dime lo crees que pasó con Geoff. Maybe I can help. If you want me to.”

“From my perspective, and I don’t know how good a witness I am, since I was his girlfriend, and I was there, and scared, that wasn’t a robbery gone wrong. It was a clean shot through — through —” She tapped her forehead with her middle and index fingers. “Hit job. After seven years as a defense attorney, I feel like I can now say that was definitely a hit job. The guy who confessed, he was lying for the sake of a deal for other crimes, other murders, they had him for.”

“So who was behind the hit, if not Will?” Barba asked, leaning in closer. 

“Maybe it was Will. But if it was, why didn’t he also have Dara, the sister who was speaking out Daniel, killed too? I can tell you this: there were two rumors going around among the Zadon siblings and Will’s wife’s family about who Daniel’s father was. The first rumor was Will himself.”

Barba cringed. 

“Second, some mobster who’d raped Daniel’s mother. Given what I know now about Will’s personality — repugnante — that rings truest to me, that she was raped by one of his seedy clients way back when, and he continued to represent the client, kept his sister from reporting, and made her keep the pregnancy.”

“So maybe Daniel’s father, if that rumor is true, was behind the hit?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s as if Will’s only loyalty is to Daniel.”

“That’s it exactly, Rafi. Listen, es tarde, estoy cansada, he terminado, I don’t know what else I can do at this point.”

“Okay.” He stood, and she stood with him. “If you need anything, I still have friends in NYPD — well, not “friends” anymore per se — but, connections. Call me if you need anything.”

“Thank you. That means a lot.”

“Promise me you’ll take good care of yourself.”

“I have been for at least three years, right?”

“Please.” He opened his arms to her and she walked into his embrace. “You’re a good person. You fought hard. You don’t deserve what’s been thrown at you.”

“You either,” she said. 

—

An hour after midnight, Benson finally responded to Barba’s text from almost six weeks earlier.

_I’m sorry I called you that night when I knew you were the worst person to call on a right-to-die case. I love you too. I hope you can forgive me._

He texted back seconds later: _Not your fault. I shouldn’t have walked away. I knew better, I knew you, and I still walked away._

_Dear Rafa,_ she wrote, _nothing changes except what has to._


	6. Theories

When Mira Margolis was 17, a few months from becoming the second-youngest person in the history of her university to earn an undergraduate degree, she started dating a 30-year-old lawyer. She started law school that fall, and her boyfriend expressed concern about her pursuits. It was the sort of screwed-expression pseudo-seriousness that was always really about something else, Mira would explain to Olivia Benson years later, and Mira never been sure whether his objections were related to gender roles or to the fact that the lawyer’s practice was rumored to be shady. Either way, Mira took his objections as warning signs and broke off the relationship. 

During their year-long relationship, Mira had met the lawyer’s younger sister, who worked as a receptionist at the firm. Later, Mira would find out that the sister was allegedly the person who coordinated the firm’s dealings with the mid-Atlantic media, which was widespread and extremely dangerous in the 1970s. In 1979, the sister was raped by a client with whom she was already in a relationship. 

In 1979, she had very little legal recourse as it was. 

The lawyer went a step further, covering up the crime completely. 

He and Mira were broken up at this point, but the fact that he’d covered up his sister’s rape to protect a client ate away at the lining of Mira’s stomach. 

The sister was pregnant. 

So was the lawyer’s new girlfriend, who was only 16, but her parents were excited about the relationship and the baby. 

Mira kept track. She’d convinced herself that it was her duty to keep track of them, no matter how many new ulcers it caused. 

If she could have, she’d have rescued both of the young boys under the lawyer’s manipulative wing, but as she and her sister planned the kidnapping/rescue, they knew they’d only be able to help one. They chose the girlfriend’s son because they worried that if they chose the sister’s son, it was more likely the mafia would come after them. 

Temporary madness, Mira would say later, temporary madness because of course they risked the mafia coming after them no matter which child they kidnapped, temporary madness from a nagging sense of ethical obligation she had to the children of awful people. 

But by the time Mira realized her temporary madness, it was too late: she was settled in New York City with her son. 

She wondered why, after a brief, month-long police investigation in Minnesota, the lawyer had stopped looking. 

Worse, she thought, why had the police stopped looking for the baby? 

Benson remembered that by the time Mira was 35, a decorated sergeant, she already saw the world as unbearably cruel. She was dedicated, and Benson, only eight years younger, used to joke that she wanted to be Mira when she “grew up,” but Mira sometimes couldn’t bear the cruelty that she so often actively witnessed, actively tried to correct. After two years with SVU, Mira transferred back to homicide. Homicide was easier for her.

On the night Benson heard that Harry Lonegan, the boy who was waiting for the heart in the cooler that she wouldn’t let take off, thinking for a split second that gray areas and blues and greens and purples had never done anybody any good, had died, waiting for another new heart, she thought of Mira, who’d have been vastly disappointed in her. 

_Have I thought you nothing, Liv?_ Mira would have said. _Save the kid, ask questions later._

She could feel Mira’s disappointment, even now. 

Benson had been complicit in enabling an unbearably cruel world for a child. She’d let the boy down. She should have saved the kid first, and asked questions later. 

Now, as Noah slept and cars honked five flights below, Benson sat at her kitchen counter with a legal pad and pen. 

**Will Zadon, 1947**

**Mira Margolis, 1960**

**Dec 1979 - Mira 19, Will 32, Daniel Zadon born**

**Early 1980 - Eric Margolis born**

**Will passes Bar in MN (71), FL (81), NY (??). Was Will in MN 77-80?**

There was no way, Benson assured herself. 

The fact that the timelines lined up was coincidence, not evidence. She was letting the events of the last few weeks, the last few months, get to her. 

Amy McCormick was Mira’s husband’s secret daughter, the product of an extramarital affair. There was no connection between Amy and Will except that their bodies had been found in the same location. There was no reason to believe that there was any connection between Mira and Will, aside from coincidence. 

Benson ripped the top sheet of paper off the legal pad, crumpled it, and threw it in the garbage. 

There was no reason to believe that there was any connection between Mira and Will, she reminded herself.

No reason except for Will having lived somewhere in Minnesota in the 1970s, practicing law there for almost a decade. But that was also nothing more than coincidence. Benson refused to let her brain make the final connection: _Will Zadon was Mira Margolis’s mobbed-up lawyer ex-boyfriend, the biological father of the boy she’d kidnapped from Will and his 16-year-old fiancée._

She scrubbed her face with her hand and curled up under a blanket on the couch, absentmindedly watching NY1’s coverage of the Franchella case, the tragic story of Harry Lonegan dying while waiting for a heart transplant. 

Jack McCoy had tried to assure her that she’d done right, that she’d avoided the sort of decision that encourage black market organ dealers. But she hadn’t saved the kid. Mira would have told her to save the kid, and Mira would have been right, much more right than Jack McCoy.

Her phone chimed. She wrapped herself in the blanket and reached towards the coffee table. 

_You okay?_ read the text. 

_Where have you been?_ she texted back.

_Right now I’m outside your building._

A followup message from Barba, thirty seconds later: _I was in the neighborhood. I’ll go home if you’re not ready._

 _Go stand under the security camera_ , she wrote. _I’ll buzz you up._

When she opened the door for him, his shoulders fell, and his red eyes seemed to plead for forgiveness. “Come in,” she said, and she laid an open hand over the back of his trenchcoat as she led him inside. 

They stood in silence in the kitchen. He reached a hand out to her. She took it.

He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and swirled his thumb into her palm. She embraced him and kissed the side of his head. “You’ve been in Miami this whole time?”

He nodded into her shoulder. “I love you,” he said, his voice muffled by her sweatshirt and the sobs caught in his throat. 

“I love you,” she promised back.

He lifted his head and wiped his eyes. “I’ve accepted a job with Rita Calhoun’s firm, so I’m back in New York, back home. If you’re still mad at me, you have every right to be.”

“Furious,” she said, but through her tears, she smiled.

He removed his coat and set it on the kitchen counter. Underneath, he wore a dress shirt, sweater, jeans, and a sport coat, what seemed like a hundred layers on this unseasonably cold mid-March night.

“I love you,” he repeated.

“Rafa.”

“What you needed me to say was _I love you_ , not _I fucked up badly and now I have to move on because I’m afraid of breaking your heart_ , and in the meantime, I broke your heart.”

“Don’t give yourself too much credit.”

He smirked, allowing a quarter-laugh to escape from his nose. “I shouldn’t.”

“But you did break my heart.”

He took her head in his hands and kissed her, slow and sweet and desperate. “I am a bad man.”

“Don’t you dare say that about my best friend.”

He kissed all the tears off her face. “I wish you’d found me one of those times you went to the bar.”

“So do I.”

“But maybe that’s how it was supposed to be because SVU needed a commanding officer — the best possible commanding officer — and Noah needed you to be his mother.”

She let out a soft “ugh” in response to how treacly, but how _true_ , that sounded. Drawing him into another embrace, tighter this time, she let herself believe — in spite of her history, in spite of all the empty spaces in her soul, in spite of the lessons learned from the repetitiveness of the last thirty, thirty-five years — that Rafael Barba was the one exception, the one who’d stay, or at the very least, the one who would, again and again, come back to her.

“I promise,” he said, taking her hand, kissing the inside of her wrist, “I —”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. “Please, I can’t handle promises right now.”

“I know. No promises, no excuses.”

“You can make one promise to me tonight.”

“Yes,” he said, “anything.”

“If you leave again —”

“I won’t.”

“You might. Promise me that if you leave again, you’ll come back.”

“Yes. Of course. I promise. Liv, you and I are —”

“Not now,” she said. “Not yet.”

“I understand. But I am glad to be home.”

“Did you see your mother?”

He let out a small, almost sarcastic, laugh. “She and I have not been on speaking terms since the trial.”

“I’m sorry.” She reached out and, pulling him closer again, absentmindedly ran her fingertips along his hairline, then up and down the back of his neck. “Give it time.”

“Time.” He stared at her, with his eyes still red and his mouth open, then pulled her in for one more kiss. “Can I invite myself for dinner tomorrow so I can bring my friend Noah a cheeseburger?”

“He’ll be a much tougher audience than me.”

“Hence the cheeseburger.”

“Yes. Of course.” 

Barba put his trenchcoat back on. Benson walked him to the door, and this time, when they said goodbye, both the captain and the attorney knew that they’d been given the chance to start over, after seven weeks, or six years, or two decades. 

—

The call from Santiago came at four in the morning on Saturday. His voice was shaking. Barba’s first fear was that he was talking about Eddie, but he quickly realized that he’d called well before dawn to tell him that Laura Burgos was missing. 

“She was supposed to move back into her old house. The movers got there but she never did. Three days, Rafi, she didn’t show up at work either. We called the police. Nobody can find Joseph either.”

“I’ll tell Benson,” Barba said, barely able to get the words out. “She was working the Daniel Zadon case in New York, and was investigating the murder of Laura’s ex-father-in-law. It’s federal but maybe she can do something.”

“I’m scared for her, Rafi. After what happened to her boyfriend, and then —” 

“I know, I know.” Barba tried not to let his mind consider the worst possibility. “Let me tell Liv, we’ll go from there. Keep me updated.”

—

On Saturday evening, Barba brought cheeseburgers to Benson and Noah. They talked, and tried to laugh, and for split seconds, they were reminiscent of a family. He kissed her goodnight, but he was distant, and there was a sense that a gulf had re-opened between them, even as they both know he’d never pull a stunt like the one he pulled in February ever again.

“Captain Eames promised me the federal task force is on this, that they’re taking it seriously as part of the entire Zadon case,” Benson told him. 

“Thank you.” He swallowed hard and started for the door. 

“Rafa?” she prompted.

“Please don’t ask me the question you want to ask me.”

“Noah missed you,” she said instead. 

“I missed him too. I missed you.” 

—

Laura was still missing as of Monday afternoon, when Rita Calhoun spotted Benson while leaving a client’s interview with Rollins and Fin. She didn’t bother to say hello, launching right into “Feds give you anything about Ms. Burgos in Miami?”

“No,” Benson said. 

She wasn’t lying: the feds, including Eames, had refused to provide her with any information on the search for Laura, and in fact, continued to refuse to tell her what was happening with their attempts to locate Daniel. 

“That fucking family’s a piece of work,” Rita muttered. 

“Tell me about it.”

“And look, don’t be mad at Raf. He’s an asshole, but he loves you.”

Benson rolled her eyes. 

“So what if they were fucking for a few weeks? Two miserable people, two good-hearted miserable people who dedicated their lives to justice, with nothing else to do.”

“Oh my God.”

“We’ve been around the block a few times, you and I. We’re not twenty-five. Why so shocked, Captain?”

“That wasn’t an _oh my God, I’m shocked,_ ” Benson said. “It was an _oh my God, you’re inappropriate_.” 

Rita smiled sarcastically. “My asshole friend Rafael has been in love with you for years. Don’t screw it up. Either of you.”

—

Barba came over for dinner again the next Saturday and regaled her with tales from his new job on the Other Side. He read Noah a story. His voice shook. He tried to hide the trembling, but couldn’t. 

He never could, Benson remembered. 

He was terrified for his friend, who’d now been missing for ten days, a bad sign. 

Not long after Barba went home for the night, Benson received a text from Fin: _Joseph Zadon’s body washed up on the shore near Bay Ridge._ That, she knew, was a worse sign.


	7. Implausible

SVU was precariously short-staffed again. Carisi was recovering from a concussion after he’d tried but failed to save Jules Hunter from a hitman, and Rollins, the only other senior detective on the squad, was covering a few extra shifts, but with Jesse at home and a sitter to pay, there was only so much she could do. Benson feared she’d lose Fin too, as soon as his sergeant’s orders came in, because Dodds certainly wouldn’t be so kind as to keep a good team together. Not so kind to her, at least.

Benson was already burning a candle at three ends when Eames knocked on her door at the start of the workday, just as she’d first settled in behind her desk. “Come in,” Benson said, spotting Eames behind the blinds. 

Rollins opened the door for Eames, who held a cup of coffee in each hand, along with a paper bag balanced carefully between her fingers and one of the coffee cups. Eames dropped the bag on Benson’s desk and handed her a cup. “Peace offering,” she said. “Coffee and a danish.”

“Thank you, Alex.” 

Eames sat across from Benson. Rollins nodded and closed the door, returning to the squadroom. 

“A better peace offering,” Benson said, “would be to let SVU back into the Daniel Zadon case, since his most recent crimes, the ones where the statutes of limitation aren’t up, happened at a day school in Manhattan.”

“I told you, Daniel’s all yours as soon as we find him.”

“Even if he committed other crimes while he was on the run?”

“Well.”

“I think we should work together on the Zadons.”

“Will’s and Joseph’s murders aren’t SVU cases. Neither is the disappearance of your friend’s friend.”

“Will covered up decades of Daniel’s sexual assaults. He enabled the most recent one because Daniel’s priors never turned up in the school’s background check.”

Eames set her coffee on the desk, folded her hands in her lap, and pursed her lips as she considered — or at least Benson hoped she was considering — the next steps. “I came here to bring you a danish and let you know that we are looking at two suspects in Will’s murder: Daniel and Laura. Both are missing, so if anything new comes across your desk —”

“You came here with your danish thinking I know something about where Laura is?”

“I came here to apologize for shutting SVU out of a case that will ultimately be theirs.”

“You said —”

“I said, when Daniel is found, he’s all yours.”

“I have no idea where Laura is. Neither do her friends and colleagues, from what I’ve heard. It’s been two weeks. They’re very worried.”

“Off the record,” Eames said, “do you believe there was a connection between the two bodies found at the Staten Island Ferry terminal last month?”

“Of course there’s a connection between the two bodies. Laura Burgos was Will’s ex-daughter-in-law and Amy’s lawyer.”

“I mean, do you believe there’s any reason behind that connection, other than coincidence?”

“You can’t come in to my precinct, tell me I’m not allowed to participate in an investigation that Manhattan SVU needs to be part of if the victims are to get any justice in the city criminal courts, then ask me for information about your case. Tell me what you know about Joseph, and I’ll tell you what I’m thinking with regard to Amy.”

“That’s fair.”

“Is it?” Benson asked, hearing a touch of Barba-like snark creep into her voice.

“Joseph had a gunshot wound to the forehead, not unlike what the detectives in Tallahassee saw with his twin brother twelve years ago.” 

“So Laura’s a suspect in that one too?”

“Possible revenge motive. But her profile doesn’t fit. Nothing about her fits. We know the Zadons made her miserable, but we’ve been talking to Florida state police, particularly to one detective who’s insisted all these years that Geoff’s murder wasn’t a robbery gone wrong but a hit job. She’s never been able to establish motive, but I buy her theory. You want my “what if” on this? I’ll give you my “what if.”

“What if,” Benson said, “Joseph, angry at Geoff for supporting their sister Dara over their parents and Daniel, over what Will considered the family’s integrity, had him killed?”

“Bingo.”

“But then how did Joseph and Laura wind up married?”

“Who knows? There’s a lot going on with that family.”

“Agreed.” Benson stood up and walked over to an empty whiteboard in the corner of her office. “So, since you held up your end of the deal, here’s mine.” She flipped the whiteboard, revealing a map she’d drawn in black marker connecting all of the pieces that seemed, almost preternaturally, connected through Laura Burgos, and through Benson herself.

Eames approached the board and squinted at the map. “Mira Margolis, the lieutenant, the cold case back in ’99.”

“You’re familiar with it?”

“My husband had just been killed in the line of duty. I felt terrible for her family. They liked the son for it, I remember, and he was —”

“Exonerated five years into his ten-year sentence. Five years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“You’re thinking that Eric Margolis is Will Zadon’s son?”

“I’m not. Not really. The dates happen to line up. And the Mira Margolis case is connected to Amy McCormick — she’s the floater they found downtown on the same day they found Will — because Mira’s husband Neil is Amy’s father, and Eric is technically, though not biologically, Amy’s half-brother. The other connection is that Will’s ex-daughter-in-law is Amy’s lawyer.” 

“And the ex-daughter-in-law is most likely a murder victim just like her ex-husband.”

Benson shuddered. 

“So,” Eames said, starting to pace the office floor, “pull the Margolis cold case, work that for a while, and see what it does for your map here.”

“When should I work that cold case, in my “spare time”? Besides, this whole map is bad police work. I’m assuming connections between events based on not-even-circumstantial evidence.” 

“This,” Eames said, circling her hand over the spot where Benson had connected Mira and the Zadons through Amy, “reminds me of the kind of work my former partner used to do.”

“Enthusiastically misguided puzzle solving that’s actually terrible detective work?”

“Yes.” Eames tapped her knuckles against the whiteboard. “Problem was, and let me tell you it was frustrating as hell, Goren was almost always right.”

—

“Melinda,” Benson said, walking into the ME’s office at the end of the workday, “I need —”

“Jules Hunter autopsy is on its way to you,” Warner said, turning towards a stretcher, away from Benson. 

“I’m here to ask for an update on Amy McCormick’s cause of death.”

“Amy McCormick?” Now Warner turned to face Benson, revealing an exasperated expression. “That’s a Lower Manhattan homicide case.”

“It relates to one of my open cases.”

“Oh?” Warner dead, heading for a laptop computer propped up on a metal desk away from the cadavers. “Which is?”

“Can’t disclose.”

“And I can’t get in trouble with Dodds and the DA for humoring you again,” Warner said.

“I’m sensing distrust.”

“Maybe you need to take a few weeks off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Can I speak as a friend?”

“This isn’t about Barba,” Benson snapped.

“I didn’t say that. You’ve had a lot on your plate these last six months.”

“I’m investigating a cold case. Lieutenant Mira Margolis, 1999. It was Brooklyn’s, but they never gave a shit about Mira, there was — corruption that I can’t talk about — and even though she headed up one of their precincts, they first let the wrong person be put away and then let her case go cold. You want to hear about a worse screwup on Jack McCoy’s part than Barba’s murder trial? It was Mira’s son’s case. Back then McCoy and Abbie Carmichael cut a deal on shoddy evidence, claiming that a jury would have sent Eric away for 20 to life otherwise.”

“I can’t —”

“Eric was exonerated by alibi witnesses, but not until he’d already served five years.”

Warner let out a long sigh. “And Amy McCormick is connected to all of this how?”

“She was Mira’s husband’s daughter. Product of an affair from when he used to go to Miami to visit his elderly grandmother. I only found out very recently.”

“Homicide contacted me about taking a second look,” Warner said. “And we’re still ruling her death a suicide.”

“On what —”

“On absence of evidence of a struggle.”

“You get to make decisions on absence of evidence around here?”

“We were thorough,” Warner insisted, “both times.”

“There are cameras on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Yes, and one caught an image of Amy falling into the East River. The detectives couldn’t see her on the span, though.”

“What about —”

“I’ve been doing this job a long time. Amy was alive when she hit the water, and there was no indication of opiates or other drugs in her system.”

“I’ve been doing my job a long time, too, Melinda. My perps go for drugs like GHB and Rohypnol because they’re out of a victim’s system in a matter of hours.”

“It’s a possibility,” Warner admitted, “but that’s on the homicide detectives, not me.”

“I’ll have to look for non-circumstantial evidence. But you’ll have to change the cause of death if you —”

“Live,” Warner said, “rest.”

Benson sighed. 

“And don’t tell me how to do my job.”

“I know.” Benson thanked Warner, said goodbye, and headed out the door of 1PP just as Barba was walking in.

“Rafa,” she called as Barba passed her.

He whirled around and dropped his shoulders in defeat, a now-familiar gesture. 

“I’m heading home for the day,” she told him. 

“I’ve got to wrap up a case for a client.”

“Which client?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters because you’re lying.”

“Liv,” he said, eyeing her sideways.

“Come with me for a cup of coffee.”

“I’ve got to —”

“If you came here to talk to Warner about Amy McCormick, she’s already chewed me out for sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. You’re a defense attorney now, with no reason to be here, so you’ll get it worse.”

He didn’t like _you’re a defense attorney now_ , she could tell. 

“All right,” he said, following her outside. 

They sat together in a booth at a nearby diner, drinking coffee and shivering a little in the chill that even April hadn’t been able to chase out of the city.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Not well,” he admitted. 

Benson reached across the table and patted Barba’s forearm. Barba picked up his phone, which had been sitting next to his coffee cup, and began to scroll. “There’s a reason I wanted to ask Warner about Amy,” he said. 

“Because of your friend. I know. Rita told me all about it.”

Barba raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think Rita —”

“Rafa, it’s okay. You think I’d pick on you when a woman involved with the Zadon family is missing?”

“This particular thing has to do with you.” 

She breathed in deep. Barba passed her the phone.

“Brace yourself,” he warned. “You’re going to throw the phone across the diner as soon as you read what —”

“Neil Tiposi,” she grumbled as she read.

Neil Tiposi, Mira’s husband, had set up a GoFundMe for funeral expenses for his daughter Amy.

Benson gritted her teeth. 

Neil was asking for money to cover funeral and burial expenses and to transport Amy’s body from New York to Miami, where he now lived. That made sense so far: Neil was a middle-school social studies teacher who wouldn’t be able to retire before he turned 80. 

What didn’t make sense was that he was asking for five million dollars.

And what definitely didn’t make sense was that in the middle of rambling on about how he needed to settle the lawsuits against Amy, he’d brought up Mira’s murder: _My beloved wife Mira was killed 19 years ago. As many of our family and friends surely understand, she was killed during a dispute with our son Eric. Eric was fortunately set free and has resolved the issues that led to that sad event, but I also need to able to continue to support him._

Benson felt her face turn hot. Eric had not killed Mira. He’d been exonerated. There were alibi witnesses, and later, DNA. The evidence against him had always been shoddy, and as Benson had learned from Barba years later, Cal Walker was a corrupt detective. She’d put it together that Mira’s murder was likely a mob hit that Walker had been asked to cover for. And yet here was Neil, trying to raise five million dollars on a site where he’d openly, and libelously, disclosed that his son had murdered his wife. 

Mira’s sister had been living and working in London since Eric was convicted, frightened that she’d meet the same fate as Mira if she stayed in New York. Samantha Margolis had never liked Neil, and even Mira admitted that she’d settled, because as the single mother of a kidnapped child living in New York City in the 1980s, what else was she going to do?

“Liv?” Barba reached across the table to cover her shaking hand with his. “Talk to me.”

“This is overwhelming,” she said, and she could hear her own voice breaking. “You’re overwhelmed, I’m overwhelmed, what good are we to each other?”

“Dinner’s on me tonight.” Barba tilted his head toward the counter at the front of the diner. “Cheeseburgers for you and me and Noah?”

“I’ll accept that offer.” She quickly wiped away a rogue tear that ran down her cheek. 

“Oh,” he said, heartbreak crossing his face. Standing halfway, he swung around and sat with her on her side of the booth, throwing an arm around her. 

“What do we do?”

“Can we talk more at home?” he asked. “At your place, I mean.”

She nodded.

—

“Cheeseburgers again?” Noah asked when Benson and Barba set the table. 

“You’re complaining?” Benson said. 

“No.”

“Thank Uncle Rafa. He brought these home for us.”

“Thanks,” Noah said with a hint of sarcasm, as much as a six-year-old could get across. He sat at the table and started on his cheeseburger while Benson and Barba were still unwrapping theirs.

“Did you finish your homework?”

“Yes.”

Barba raised an eyebrow. “How much homework is there in kindergarten these days?”

“Just math and writing,” Noah told him. 

“No torts? No contracts? No civil procedure?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Benson said, her expression brightening for the first time all day. 

“Torts are those big raspberry things from the diner?”

“Yes,” Barba answered.

Noah begged Barba to please read him two stories before bed, and Barba obliged. He was surprised when Noah threw his arms around him, hugging him tight.

“What was that?” Barba asked when he and Benson returned from Noah’s bedroom. He sat down and patted the spot next to him on the couch. 

“The hug?”

“I thought he was mad at me.”

“He’s six,” Benson said, sitting next to Barba. “You came back. That’s all that matters.”

“And you?”

“I’m angry. Not at you, at Neil. I don’t know what to think. You?”

“Worried.”

Benson reached a hand out to Barba. “If it’s any consolation —”

“She hasn’t been _found_ like they found her ex-husband.

“Yes.”

“I can’t talk about this right now.” 

“I don’t know if Neil ever had any clue that Eric wasn’t his biological son,” Benson said, returning the subject to Mira’s husband. “But this, I don’t know what to make of a guy who accuses his son of a crime he’s already been exonerated for, in a plea to his family and friends on a crowdfunding site. I’m wondering if Neil could have had something to do with Mira’s murder. Her sister and I, we always thought he was just — stupid.”

“Aren’t a significant proportion of murderers “just stupid”?”

“Yes. And most people who organize hits and heists manage to pull it off on nothing but dumb luck. Still, it’s hard to believe Neil could have been involved.”

Barba stretched an arm across the back of the couch. “Nobody liked him for the murder at this time?”

“He had an alibi, and years later the DNA cleared him too. You knew what was happening with that case, with Walker. You said so yourself.”

“I didn’t know a lot, all I knew, like I said, was that Cal Walker had mob connections, and given what you’ve told me about Mira, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was covering for a mob hit.”

“If we’d have talked back then —”

“We could have put our stories together —”

“Solved the case, had hits put out on us too.” 

Barba shrugged. “I’m sure after Munson, there are still plenty of hits out on me.”

“Rafael.”

His eyes were sloped with worry. “This is too much.”

“I’m sorry about your girlfriend.”

“Olivia.” He said the name loudly, forcefully, but without any real anger behind it. He was tired.

“It’s okay. Rita told me.”

Barba raised one knee to the level of the couch cushions and turned to face Benson. “Rita told you what, exactly?” He shook his head and waved his free hand. “Nope. Let me make this clear: Laura is not my girlfriend. We” — he cleared his throat — “were looking for comfort during very difficult times.”

“You were having sex so you didn’t have to think,” she corrected.

“Almost.”

“Almost?”

Barba rubbed his forehead. A narrow, uncomfortable smile formed on his face. “You don’t expect details, do you?”

“No, of course not.”

“All I’ll tell you is, the flu is a very sudden onset illness.”

“What?” Reflexively, she moved closer. “She gave you the flu?”

“No. We were — almost — and I was” — he used one hand to indicate throwing up — “and shivering with a high fever. Laura said she’s not a believer, but to her it looked like some higher power was telling us not to go any further with our, uh, flirtations. After that, she decided she agreed with Rita that you and I are a good” — here he flashed her a real grin — “ship.”

_Ship,_ she mouthed.

“Fan fiction term for a relationship that fans root for.”

_Fan fiction._ “Oh!” she said out loud. “Amy McCormick’s fraud case.”

“Laura said that case was less about fan fiction than it was about horrendous privacy violations,” Barba told her.

“Makes sense, then, that Amy’s the daughter of a man who would accuse his own son of a crime that he definitely didn’t commit.” Benson stopped to think for a moment. “Did they read the stories? The attorneys, the detectives, everyone involved in Amy’s cases?”

“I’d assume a cursory read at least.”

“She might have disclosed some important things in there, either in purpose or subconsciously.”

“All they’d find would be loads and loads of inadmissible circumstantial evidence.”

“Maybe I’ll call Captain Eames tomorrow and make the suggestion,” Benson said, half-wondering out loud.

“And she’ll listen to you?” 

“I’m very convincing.”

“Are you?” Another smile, sweet and lopsided and teasing this time. 

“Very, very convincing.”

Holding out a hand, he waved her closer with his long fingers. She obliged and kissed his lips, languorous and sweet and slow like in the kitchen when he’d first come back from Miami. 

“How many times,” he said, “did you talk me into taking on cases that ended with me arguing in front of the Court of Appeals about changing statutes?”

“Mm,” was all she said. 

He craned his head upward to nuzzle her neck. “We’re a good ship, you and I.”

“We are.” Their foreheads were pressed together. They were soon jolted out of the moment, however, by the repetitive melody of Benson’s phone. “God. Damn. It,” she said, reaching for the phone on the coffee table. She examined the screen. “Warner. After nine o’clock.”

“Hi Melinda,” Benson said into her phone. 

“I’m sorry to bother you so late, Liv. I don’t have Captain Eames’s personal number, I don’t know if she wants anyone in the city offices to have it, but I need some information before I decide how to … proceed.”

“Captain Eames? This is about the Zadons?”

“We ran Will Zadon’s DNA to make sure the feds were looking at the right people and that Eames’s team hadn’t missed anything, and … they missed something. Is it possible that Will is Daniel’s father, not his uncle?”

“When we were investigating, Carisi told me that there were rumors in the family, but it was just talk. Please don’t tell me —”

“He’s not the father in the way that you’re thinking. Daniel’s parents are definitely not related. If what we’re seeing is correct, the woman who Daniel thought was his mother wasn’t his mother.”

Daniel Zadon was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in December 1979. 

Eric Margolis was, according to Mira, born in St. Paul in early 1980. They celebrated his birthday in February every year, but she said he’d been born earlier than that, closer to New Year’s Day. 

“I’d say re-test just to be safe,” Benson told Warner, “but this is Capain Eames’ and the feds’ case until Daniel is found. I am going to pay a visit to Eames to see if she’d be willing to put a different DNA test through your office that may be related to this case.”

“Really? Who?”

“I’ll fill you in if Eames okays it.”

It was a nonsense theory, unsupported by logic, unsupported by anything vaguely resembling sound evidence.

Benson’s arms were at her sides, her phone returned to the coffee table. Barba wrapped his arms around her in a sideways embrace, a puppy-dog expression in his eyes and on his lips. 

“What?” she asked.

“I love you.”

“I think —”

“You think you’re going to be working tonight.”

“Yes.” She turned and mussed a hand through his hair, smiling when a cowlick popped up. “Do you still want to stay?”

“Anything you want.”

“I don’t want to be alone with my own thoughts tonight.”

“What are you thinking?”

“That somehow — entirely implausibly, entirely without good evidence — that in 1980, Mira kidnapped the wrong baby. She kidnapped the mobster’s son, or the baby who the mobster believed was his son.”


	8. Episodic

When SVU had first been alerted to Daniel Zadon’s assaults at the day school where he’d been working for more than two years, there were no complaining witnesses, no outcry witnesses, until Carisi directly questioned parents, teachers, and students. In court a few months back, Daniel’s lawyer had leveraged this fact to get him released without bail. 

Benson faulted McCoy for Daniel’s convenient disappearance and their subsequent loss of jurisdiction, but she knew that she bore some of the blame too. The initial report had been anonymous, from a man in North Carolina who claimed to be a retired detective who’d known all about how far Will Zadon was willing to go to protect his nephew. Carisi, who was worried about how well their warrants would hold up in court, wanted to trace the call. “We can’t,” Benson had told him, “because if his name gets out in the press, or if it gets back to the Zadons, people will be afraid to report anonymously.”

At midnight, Benson sat in a chair in the corner of the bedroom usually reserved for clothes she wanted to keep off the floor. She scrolled through emails on her tablet, opening the one Carisi had sent a day ago, containing the name _Roger Deimant_ , who was, indeed, a retired NYPD detective living in North Carolina. 

Two discrepancies weighed on Benson’s mind: first, standard procedure for tips on endangered minors was to go to ACS first, who would contact SVU themselves, and a retired detective first-grade surely would have known that; second, Daniel’s very-much-sealed prior assaults had taken place in Miami (and Geoff’s murder, in Tallahassee), but Deimant had never lived or worked in Florida. 

Barba was asleep under the comforter, snoring lightly. It was amusing, sweet even, how he’d made himself comfortable, folding his trousers and his button-down shirt and leaving them on top of the dresser as if he’d been intimately familiar with the room for years. 

What if, Benson asked herself, Deimant knew perfectly well that the proper procedure was to contact ACS first? 

Deimant was working in New York when Daniel assaulted his cousins (possibly his siblings, if what Warner discovered was correct) in Miami. When Geoff and Dara came forward, when Geoff was murdered in Tallahassee, Deimant was a detective in Brooklyn.

Benson logged into an NYPD database — sure, they’d see that the login came from her home, from her personal wi-fi, but she’d deal with that later, since Eames had directed her to look at the Margolis case, after all — and searched for cases that Deimant had worked on. 

Her fingers froze in place, hovering over the tablet. 

In the 1980s, Deimant had worked multiple cases with Cal Walker, the lead detective on the Mira Margolis murder.

Deimant — possibly, plausibly — had contacted SVU first, before ACS, because he specifically wanted Benson to know about Daniel. He was, perhaps, trying to tip her off to the connection between Will Zadon and Mira Margolis. 

The connection that Benson may have simply made up, scribbled on a legal pad, because of intersecting dates. 

Until 1990, Roger Deimant and Cal Walker were partners. 

Deimant was Walker’s partner. That meant —

Barba continued snoring. 

Leaving the tablet on the chair, she climbed under the covers and nudged his shoulder. He let out a startled snort, followed by an “mmph,” and rolled to his other side, facing her.

“Rafa,” she whispered. She touched his face. 

His eyes shot open. “No,” he said, and she realized he thought she was going to give him bad news about Laura. 

“Shh, no, no, we haven’t heard anything about Laura yet,” she assured him, knowing he wouldn’t like what would come next either. “Let’s say hypothetically that the man who tipped us off about Daniel’s assaults was a retired detective who’d been Walker’s partner in the 1980s.” 

“Roger?” Barba said, swallowing hard. 

“Yes.” 

Barba sat up. “Roger is a good man,” he told Benson. 

“And he told you everything he knew about Walker?”

“I was an ADA and in the same county and we were very, very careful about conflicts of interest after we disclosed.” 

“Are you sure?”

“What do you mean, are you sure?” He lowered his voice back to a whisper. “I remember everything from that period of my life in full focus. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, but the only part of it that was good was Roger. He’s a good man, and he clearly did the right thing by tipping you off about Daniel.”

“Why did he wait so long to come forward?”

“Maybe he was in danger. Please don’t drag Roger into this.”

Benson stood, picked up her tablet again, and paced the floor in front of the dresser. 

“Liv,” Barba said, his voice sharper now, “you need to trust me.”

“I do,” she promised, but still, she couldn’t help wonder if Deimant, now 60, was feeling mortality tug at his conscience, if he had been corrupt, if he had aided Walker in covering up the identity of Mira’s actual murderer. 

“No,” he said, “I can tell you don’t.” The words came out quickly. She could tell he was upset. 

“Mira either took the biological son of a mobster who’d emptied his pockets in child support and hush money, or she took her ex’s son, or — there are a lot of possibilities, and all of them suggest that Mira’s murder was a mob hit covered up by Cal Walker. Since Deimant was Walker’s partner back in the 80s, he might know more than he let on, and tipped us off about Daniel so we’d finally get Mira’s case solved.”

“Why would the mobster have let his own son be sentenced for the crime, then?”

“I don’t know. I’ll talk to Eames. Definitely the feds’ jurisdiction now.” She left the tablet on the dresser and returned to bed. “Only time you’ll ever hear me say this: I’m not touching Walker with a ten-foot pole. The feds can handle him.”

“That’s exactly what Roger said.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“In any case, you need to be careful,” Barba warned. “Whoever killed Mira, for whatever reason, had no qualms about killing a police lieutenant.”

“I’ll talk to Eames tomorrow,” she said, not responding to his comment, “I’ll get in touch with Eric, see if he’ll let us run his DNA against the databases, figure out who is supposed to be who in all this mess.”

“You’ll need a new sample. You can’t use the sample that was used to exonerate him.”

“You sound like a defense attorney.”

He was quiet for a few seconds. “Don’t worry, okay?” he said, staring at her across the darkened room. “Don’t worry.”

“Same goes for you.”

“And of course I sound like a defense attorney. I am a defense attorney.”

“For now, at least.”

“For now. Probably for a while. And Liv,” he said, taking a deep breath, “Roger Deimant is a good man and was a very good detective. We ended our relationship because he wasn’t out to his family. Had nothing to do with Walker, nothing whatsoever. I was 29, he was 40, and what kind of life were we going to have if he both refused to tell them about me and refused to stop visiting them once a week and lying? That’s what I said back then, when I was 29. I didn’t understand. It was my fault. I was selfish and stubborn.”

“I’ll tell Eames to look at Walker, but I won’t bring up Deimant. If she finds a connection on her own, though —”

“Let her look.” Barba’s voice broke. “I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no, whatever happens, cariño, okay?” He reached out a hand to her and she returned to the bed. “When that relationship ended, I thought that was it for me. Yelina left me for Alex just before I started law school, a few weeks before, and that hit me like a ton of bricks. Roger and I started out as a flirtation, where Brooklyn SVU was taking bets on when we’d get together, and, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“Because,” she said, taking his hand and sitting beside him, “sometimes you have to talk to someone who can take a little weight off that ton of bricks.”

“You believe that?”

“Somebody who’s had a kind of — episodic — life when it comes to love too. So if Eames —”

“Liv, sweetheart,” he said, massaging her hand with his, “sleep. You need it.”

She curled up beside him and drew the covers up to her waist. “Is this all right?” she mumbled, resting her head on his shoulder.

“Yes. Come here.” 

Benson closed her eyes and swallowed hard. In moments like this, Barba the brass-egoed prosecutor was practically a puppy. Mistakes aside — and he’d made some big ones — he loved her. For a moment, she felt almost lucky. 

She fell asleep with his arms around her. 

—

In the morning, Barba returned to his apartment to change into a suit for arraignment court (“I hope I remember to stand behind the correct podium,” he joked), and after Lucy arrived, Benson went to 1PP and spoke to Eames about how the nature of the anonymous tip that set off the Daniel Zadon case now led her to believe that Daniel’s uncle was the ex that Mira had told her about way back when. “What this boils down to,” Benson said, “is that Will’s mob connections may be what got Mira killed.”

Eames held up a finger and started to pace back and forth across her office. “If I tell you something —”

“It doesn’t leave this room,” Benson promised.

“Back in our Major Case days, my partner and I were investigating exactly that. Goren got into a fight with Tucker from IAB. Tucker wanted more evidence against Walker, but Goren didn’t have it. When I saw his name on your whiteboard the other day, I —” Eames stopped in her tracks and, pressing the palm of her hand into the back of a chair, squinted in Benson’s direction. “The fact that a mobbed-up detective was investigating your friend’s murder never came up between you and Tucker?”

“No,” Benson admitted. “I never really talked to him about Mira. I’m not sure he even knew we were friends.”

“Say no more.”

Benson smiled. “So what I need from you is permission to talk to Eric Margolis, to ask him if he’ll take a new DNA test that we can run against Will Zadon, CODIS, and all the international databases that they’ll let us — or, you — use.”

“You seem more confident in your theory now.”

“Now that I know you and your partner were headed in that direction, too, it makes a lot of difference.”

“Nothing about the Zadons ever crossed our path. I’ll get you the clearance you need. Might be the missing piece to our investigation against Walker. We could never get him.”

“Maybe now you will. Many years too late, but maybe you’ll get him.”

From 1PP, Benson headed to Bay Ridge, where Mira’s son Eric had been renting an apartment ever since Amy’s death. Neil had returned to Miami, but Eric wanted to be back in the neighborhood he grew up in, back near his mother’s memory. 

“My dad was scared, that’s why he tried to sell me out on that website,” Eric told Benson. “He’s scared he won’t be able to pay for all the settlements against Amy, all the legal fees. I didn’t kill my mom. I wasn’t even in the city that day. You believe that, don’t you?”

“I know it,” Benson assured him. “DNA proved it.”

Eric was grown now, in his late thirties, gray streaks already creeping up his temples, surely the result of five years of imprisonment for a crime he didn’t commit. Behind his beard and glasses, Benson noticed, Eric looked a lot like Daniel. 

“Your mother believed in doing whatever you have to do to save a life,” Benson said, “and that’s why she saved yours.”

“All those years, all that time in court, and the truth never came out. To this day I’ll never understand why.”

“Because your mother _fought_ to make sure you were protected.”

“My dad didn’t know either. I had no idea until you told me — what — five years ago?”

Benson nodded. “And you never told anyone, not your dad, not Amy?”

“I swear.” 

“Eric,” she said, sitting with him at his kitchen table, “have you ever heard the name Will Zadon?”

“Yes. That’s the guy they were looking at, the body, when they found Amy.”

“In any other context?”

Eric shrugged. “Other than that, nothing.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

“I’m so sorry for what they put you through,” she said, struggling to keep the tears she wanted to cry for Mira and her son at bay. 

“But you always fought for me, Aunt Liv. I’m grateful.”

“I tried. There’s not much I can tell you now, and that’s for your own safety, but would you be willing to take a DNA test? I’m sure that’s the last thing you want to do, given your history with being falsely accused —”

“Will it help Amy?”

“It might.”

“Maybe I’m just too full of grief,” Eric said, “but I don’t think she killed herself.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Besides, the case belongs to downtown homicide.”

“Amy’s lawyer, she’s missing, you know.”

“I know,” Benson said. “Are you sure you never heard the name Will Zadon?”

“Not before Amy was found, no. He wasn’t — was he the guy Amy’s lawyer was married to? No, that can’t be, he was found here in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. I’ve been trying to keep track, for Amy’s sake, you know.” 

“He was Amy’s lawyer’s ex-father-in-law.”

“What?” 

Benson held out a hand. “I never told you that.”

Eric motioned zipping his lips.

“Listen, I promise you,” Benson continued, “I promise from the bottom of my heart, whatever happens, I will share the results with you.”

Maybe it was her mind getting away from her again, but Benson could not get over how much Eric and Daniel looked alike. 

“I trust you,” Eric promised.

“You don’t have to.”

“My mother trusted you. Mom thought everyone in the world was an idiot except for me, and for you.”


End file.
